mikaelsouza

So, for the past few years, I've been struggling with depression. I am already taking care of my mental health doing therapy and taking prescripted meds for depression.

A few weeks ago, I had a depressive crisis where I couldn't do anything related to study/work and kept reflecting about life for a few days.

With help from my psychiatrist, I noticed I had set up impossibly high expectations for my life and because of that, everything I accomplished always felt like it was nothing or it felt like it was something already expected for me to accomplish. Because of that, much of what I do feels empty and does not give me pleasure.

I'm 26 and I'm finishing my Master's Degree, researching NLP, but it feels like there are not many jobs which I could work as a researcher where I live. I also don't feel prepared to move to another country to join a big company (I want to work at MS someday lol).

All of that makes me feel like what I am doing is for nothing and that it has no meaning. I also feel locked into a path which I don't enjoy much anymore. While I want to work as a researcher, to learn more and make use of all I've learned until now, I want to try other things related to computers.

It looks like I've been rambling for a while. I am not really sure what I wanted to accomplish writing this, but I think the main points are: * How to fix my expectations to make accomplishments matter? * While NLP is an interesting topic, it feels like there are not many opportunities where I live; * I want to try new things besides Machine Learning, but I feel locked in this path already. Maybe it's already implied, but I am not from the US.

I've been working on the Punctuation Restoration Problem for my Master's Thesis, however, me being primarily a programmer at heart, I wish I could use some of my NLP skills to solve issues related to programming in general.

I know Microsoft does lots of research in NLP and I think after they acquired Github, they have an immense dataset to work with for any problems they want to tackle. Most recently I think they did a great job on their new python suggestion extension on VSCode.

So, could you suggest to me some issues you think are interesting research topics? This is something that I would like to work with, but I have no idea where to start yet.

The same question can be applied to the microphone.

I am actually curious if there are reports about phones taking pictures of their owners without their consent to be used in ML models or anything like that.

It seems to be something that Google and Apple could do without much effort and without the user noticing.