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What are the eligibility criteria for DST-INSPIRE Fellowship?

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Distinguished 950 pts 0 followers
National Institute of Technology Karnataka · Posted
Chemistry Natural Language Processing

Situation

I completed my MTech from NIT Trichy in 2022 and have been working in industry since then. I now want to apply for PhD programs, both in India (IISc, IITs) and abroad (ETH, CMU, UW).

My concern

Does a two-year industry gap hurt PhD applications significantly? I have:

  • 1 workshop paper at NeurIPS 2023
  • 2 patents filed (1 granted)
  • Good academic record (9.1 CGPA)
  • Strong recommendation letters from my MTech guide

Would love to hear from people who have successfully navigated this situation.

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5 Replies

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Meghana Rao Growing 170 pts · Accepted answer

Great question.I went through something very similar in my second year.

The key insight for me was that LoRA is actually quite well-suited for NER tasks, especially in low-resource settings. I would recommend:

  1. Use LoRA with r=8 or r=16.don't go higher for 8K samples
  2. Apply LoRA to attention layers only, not the feed-forward layers
  3. Use a cosine learning rate schedule with warm-up (10% of steps)

For Telugu-English code-mixed NER specifically, you might also look at MuRIL.it is pretrained on Indian language data and often outperforms XLM-R on Indic tasks even with less fine-tuning data.

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Xena D'Souza Starting 25 pts · Accepted answer

The IEEE TPAMI turnaround in my case was 7 months for the first review. Plan accordingly.

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Replying to Xena D'Souza
Harini Balakrishnan Active 215 pts · Accepted answer

This question comes up a lot. The answer really depends on your specific field and what your committee values.

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Replying to Xena D'Souza
Sanjay Kumar Growing 145 pts · Accepted answer

Highly recommend checking out the PMRF portal for the actual numbers.they update the stipend structure annually.

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Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

Seconding the recommendation for Zotero. Game changer for managing references across multiple projects.