Older blog entries for cerquide (starting at number 29)

Back to work after my honeymoon. :o(

I have been proposed to be in the international committe of ICCI 2004.

I am working in a paper for SIAM DM (deadline Sept. 15)

I have updated my home page.

I am working hard to end up my PhD thesis document. I have to remake some of the experimental work, and that takes ages and lots of effort. I am lucky to have the cluster available. I hope to finish it before I go on holidays. I think I am a bit too stressed.

I have had access to the Linux cluster in the department for the first time. Now I know how it feels the pover of 32 dual xeons under my keyboard :o)

I have to remake part of the experimental work in my thesis to homogeneize its presentation. This is easy due to Durin.

Lately I have been reading a lot. I have been through "Learning Kernel Classifiers" by Herbrich (which I strongly recommend), "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory" by Vapnik (which is more biased but good also) and the first chapters of "Causality" by Pearl. Now I am reading "A Probabilitic Theory of Pattern Recognition" by Devroye et. al.

I am also reading "The Ruby Way" to prepare my next Ruby course (thanks to fxn).

Long since last post. Recent news:

I have been to St. Augustine, Florida for the FLAIRS 2003 conference. It was very nice, a mix of local and international that kept a good technical level at a very friendly atmosphere. My presentation was kind of boring and uninteresting. I have to learn how to keep the audience interest.

I have been accepted a paper for the International Conference on Machine Learning to be held in Washington DC in August. I am happy, because this is one of the most prestigious Machine Learning conferences and I have never been to it. I am looking for a cheap travel option to see NY with Elena and then go to Washington to end up relaxing in Punta Cana (that is going to be my honeymoon). Today I have been finishing the experiments for the final version. I was asked by the reviewers to include statistical significance testing for the results. The results are significant with a 95% confidence.

Today I have given a class about "Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning" in the middle of the "Ronda Universitat" in Barcelona. It was fun.

I am reading Steffen Evers "An Introduction to Open Source Software Development".

I have been asked by two of my students (esteve and angels) to give a class in the middle of the street tomorrow in order to protest against Iraq's invasion. Yes, fxn, two of your future students are also in advogato and you still have not certified them :op

More than one month since my last post.

Things I am actually (or have been lately) involved in :

- Making a presentation for my FLAIRS 2003 paper

- Correcting my student projects.

- Waiting for my PhD thesis presubmission to be accepted

- Learning Ruby, because I will be teaching it on the next course.

- Learning biochemistry and speciallizing in protein folding.

- Reading "Bayesian Theory" by Bernardo and Smith

- Finishing the final version of my PhD thesis

- Saying NO to Iraq war as often as I can

- Trying OpenOffice, which works great for me.

- Psicollogically preparing for my wedding.

- Getting used to UML, Eclipse and EclipseUML.

- Improving my Catalan in order to get the official C-level certificate.

I have programmed a small script to keep my evolution Tasks and Calendar synchronized at home and at work. It uses the Unison file synchronizer. It can be downloaded from here.

And now I have no excuse to keep my tasks and calendar outdated.

After two days with Galeon I have decided to go back to Opera again. Galeon is far too heavy.

I am almost done with my installation. I tested a lot of new software. I am running Gnome at work and home with Sawfish as window manager. Im running Gnome due to its wonderful workgroup suite Evolution from Ximian. It is a very good IMAP mail reader and incorporates a good calendar and task manager. Definitely far ahead of what I am used to see in Unix environments. I am running Galeon as browser, but I have been testing Opera and it does a nice job too. Anyone knows why are browsers so heavy anyhow???

Today I have submitted the final version for our Novatica paper on personalization.

In the next few days I have to finish my PhD thesis summary in order to go through a external review process. I also have to finish my TBMATAN paper to submit it to ICML and to JAIR and to submit the final version of my FLAIRS 2003 paper. Everything before February 15. Ah, by the way I will start teaching Feb, 10!!!