I am filing an EB1-A petition with a law firm. The law firm says that based on their recent experience, EB1-A cases that have requested Premium Processing (PP) have a lower approval rate and a higher RFE rate.

While the statistic may be true, is there a causation between PP and RFE/denial or is it just that cases created in a rush with PP might simply get more RFE or denial?

Thanks

With all due respect, the firm's data is 100% anecdotal and I would say meaningless. There's no reliable data on this question since there's no control studies (and can't be) on the relative merits of filing EB1As with or without premium processing. We file 99% of our EB1As with premium processing because most of our clients don't want to wait 6 months to hear back from USCIS.

Hi Peter! I am an ML postdoc with ~200 citations and a few papers at top ML conferences. I would like to apply for the EB2-NIW and I am wondering if it is really necessary to go through a lawyer. I have heard from a few people online who have wrote the petition themself, but from what I have gathered, most people go through lawyers. What would you recommend? Thank you.

That's really a question of cost-benefit because from a purely outcome standpoint, I would recommend going with someone (a lawyer) who has prepared and filed these types of applications. At a minimum, I would recommend having a lawyer review your background to see what options you have (NIW or even EB1A) and to identify any issues. Because with your focus and background, you also might qualify for EB1A.

It is worth noting that circulant matrices are 1-dimensional convolutions with circular padding, and their properties can be extended to doubly-block circulant matrices, which are the 2-dimensional equivalent. The eigendecomposition of doubly-block circulant matrices has been exploited in the context of robustness and stability in deep learning [1, 2, 3].

[1] The Singular Values of Convolutional Layers

[2] Orthogonalizing Convolutional Layers with the Cayley Transform

[3] Efficient Bound of Lipschitz Constant for Convolutional Layers by Gram Iteration

Hi Peter, I will be starting a postdoctoral position on a J1 visa in a few months. My wife will get the J2 visa which will allow her to travel to the US. Can she apply for the EAD while in the us temporarily and return to Europe to continue working for her company while waiting for the validation of her EAD? Do you know the waiting time for EAD at the moment? Thank you for your help.

The answer to your first question is yes. There's a lot of variation in the processing time. We're seeing anywhere from 3 to 9 months for J-2 EADs.

This is very interesting. However, our lifestyle is not very linear, meaning that we can have some period more stressful than over. In this context, how do you deal with confounding variables ? For example, if my inflammation levels decrease in the next few weeks, it might be because I took some ginger everyday but it might also be because I had a less work and therefore more sleep.

Love this question. We can track as many additional variables as you like. For example - I track my lifestyle intervention (meditation) + 4 key dimensions of health (sleep, stress, nutrition, exercise) on a scale of 1-5 (1=bad, 5 = good). This gives me the added context you are talking about. In the future, we also plan to add the ability to connect to your wearables.

This is basically just facilitating people data dredging their own health. If you measure one outcome variable and enough "candidate" inputs you'll eventually find something that looks like a pattern.

As a doctor I measure CRP when I'm specifically looking for something - but that's in the context of having formed a differential diagnosis, then having considered the pre-test probably of each differential, and forming a view that the test result with alter the overall likely outcome. The last thing I would even want to do (for me or my patients) is to start randomly measuring CRP when generally well.

Why not just eat the ginger?

They don't even test for CRP but hsCRP (info is buried somewhere in the marketing babble). Also see my other comment below OP

Life is short in a sense that I know I won’t have time to learn about everything there is to learn. I won’t have time to study and understand the proof of Fermat Last Theorem, the latest breakthroughs of physics. I won’t be able learn piano like a professional or violin. I know that I won’t have time to read many classic of literature, etc. I can choose to do certain things but now I have to choose where to focus my time.

IMHO these books are not used for research. In order to contribute to research you need to be at the cutting edge of the existing contributions which are the most recent papers. On the other hand, these kind of books are useful because there are a huge aggregation of past research and it is based on these kinds of ressources that professors make their courses and that undergrads and graduates students learn.