A Research Survival Guide: A Retrospective on my First Six Years Learning How to Research. Speaker: Mike Davies.

Curiosity and serendipity led me to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Architecture, but did not prepare me to navigate the gauntlet of graduate research. After six years, many paper rejections, and countless sleepless nights, I was able to publish a first-author paper, forming the basis for my thesis. The experience pushed me to learn a lot about myself, how I learn and ideate, and most importantly, how to bridge my own personal way of thinking to the reality of academic research. In this talk I will reflect on my journey — offering the lessons I learned about myself and research in practice — with the goal of helping graduate students thrive in computer architecture research.

Bio. Michael Davies joined NVIDIA in July 2024 and is a member of the Architecture Research Group. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 where he was advised by Karu Sankaralingam. Mike's current work focuses on emerging execution models for Deep Learning on GPUs. At a broad level, he is interested in topics spanning architecture, programming languages and operating systems with an eye towards how abstractions at different layers of the technology stack can be crafted to help deliver performance and efficiency by construction – for deep learning and beyond.