Storytime & Reading Comments | Two Minute Papers

Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. We have reached a lot of milestones lately. For instance, we now have over one million views on the channel. In the next few days we're also hoping to hit ten thousand subscribers. To put it in perspective, in 2015 August 20th, we have had a 250 subscriber special episode where my mind was pretty much blown. That was only about 9 months ago. Whoa. For the record, here is an image that supposedly contains ten thousand people. Just imagine that they all have doctoral hats and you immediately have a mental image of ten thousand of our Fellow Scholars. It's insanity. And I must say that I am completely blown away by your loyal support. Thanks so much for everyone for the many kind messages, comments and e-mails, of which I'll read quite a few in a second. It just boggles the mind to see that so many people are interested in learning more about awesome new research inventions, and I hope that it is as addictive to you as it was for me when I first got to see some of these results. A huge thank you also to our generous supporters on Patreon, I find it really amazing that we have quite a few Fellow Scholars out there who love the series so much that they are willing to financially help our cause. Just think about it. Especially given that fact that it's not easy to make ends meet these days, I know this all too well being a full time researcher, doing Two Minute Papers and having a baby is extremely taxing, but I love it. I really do. And I know there are people who have it way worse, and here we have these Fellow Scholars who believe in this cause and are willing to help out. Thanks so much for each one of you, I am honored to have loyal supporters like you. We are more than halfway there towards our first milestone on Patreon, which means that our hardware and software costs can be completely covered with your help. As you know, we have really cool perks for our Patrons. One of these perks is that, for instance, our Professors can decide the order of the next episodes, and I was really surprised to see that this episode won by a record number of points. Looks like you Fellow Scholars are really yearning for some story time, so let's bring it on! The focus of Two Minute Papers has always been what a work is about and why it is important. It has always been more about intuition than specific details. That is the most important reason why Two Minute Papers exists. But this sounds a bit cryptic, so let me explain myself. Most materials on any scientific topic on YouTube are about details. When this big deep learning rage started, and it was quite fresh, I wanted to find out what deep learning was. I haven't found a single video that was not at least 30-90 minutes long, and all of them talked about partial derivatives and the chain rule, but never explained what we're exactly doing and why we are doing it. It took me four days to get a good grasp, a good high-level intuition of what is going on. I would have loved to have a resource that explains this four days worth of research work in just two minutes in a way that anyone can understand. Anyone. I haven't found anything, and this was just one example of many. Gandhi said "Be the change that you wish to see in the world", and this is how Two Minute Papers was born. It has never been about the details, it has always been about intuition