I’ve had a cold the past few days, which had been making me feel kind of miserable. However, I really compounded my suffering when I followed my after-dinner martini with a hot, lemony Neo Citran. Even with a couple of hours separating them, there were consequences: excruciating;y boring dreams that managed to be disturbing, too, though mostly for their boringness. And a generally stoned and unhappy Eric for the entire yesterday.
Note to self: don’t do that.
The past few days, I’ve been running various errands for my trip to southeast Asia. I went to MEC and got a bunch of travelly items, including a new bag (30L; I’ll be flying a lot, so my plan is to get everything I need into a carryon bag). I’ll post my packing list later. Today, I got my watch fixed, confirmed some bookings and printed out all the paperwork and guides I’ll ever need. Next week, I visit the dentist, the optometrist and the immunization clinic (still need another Hepatitis B shot).
This is by far the most-planned, most-researched, most-prepared trip I’ve ever taken. Quite different from my usual plan of ‘grab a guidebook at the airport and read it on the plane’.
This week is the Neural Information Processing Systems workshop in Vancouver and Whistler — apparently, skiers and snowboarders are quite well represented in the AI and neuroscience communities. I enjoy the conference and get a lot out of it, but I do tend to find academic conferences have a fair bit of “angels on the head of a pin” aspect to them, and I don’t really feel very much at home with large swaths of the academic Machine Learning community, who have a passion for stats that I can only admire from a distance. It’s been clear to me for some time now that as much as I enjoy research, my path is destined to take me out of the ivory tower into industrial research and development.
That’s not to say NIPS isn’t interesting. I snuck away from my work in Yaletown to hear Joshua Tenenbaum speak today. I think he’s doing some fascinating work, that I’ve been following for a while now.
Since about 1990, AI has been revolutionised by using probabilities, rather than rules, to model human-intelligence-type tasks. This is what powers Google, and computer vision, and other recent successes in AI. However, it was generally felt that this was just a hack, and that the mind processes experience through an inate structure — the most famous proponent of this being, of course, Noam Chomsky. What Josh and other people his area are working on is empirical, rather than structural models, of the brain. In a series of clever experiments, they show that, for certain problems at least, the brain really does seem to make guesses in a Bayesian probabilistic way, just like (much of) Machine Learning. Nobody knows why or how — clearly, we don’t have Bayesian solvers embedded in our heads doing Monte Carlo sampling — but the fact that the solutions are often the same opens the possibility that Machine Learning and Cognitive Science may yet be linked in much more profound way that was thought about five or ten years ago.
Anyway, if you’re a machine learning person and you want more info, you know how to get it. But if you’re not, I highly recommend you check out this article from The Economist about Josh Tenenbaum and Thomas Griffith’s work. It’s really fascinating stuff. I linked to it before, on the previous incarnation of my blog, but that link is long gone, now, and a little reposting never hurt anyone, now did it?
“Eric,” I hear you asking. “What the heck you been up to lately?” Well, the past few weeks have been busy ones for me.
Several days a week I’m working at my Yaletown start-up. We’re gearing up for our public beta at the end of the year, trying to hire a few good people, and generally actin’ all high-energy, high-focus. It’s a very stimulating environment — writing code, working with smart people on a project I actually believe in… And hey, I get paid to do it. Mostly in options, mind you, which I requested when we discussed compensation. As far as I’m concerned, my financial needs are pretty modest and already easily met, so I’ll take the fantasy of one day having lots of money over the reality of having a bit more money any day. Also, for a project I believe in, I can find money to be oddly demotivational. It’s too easy when things aren’t going well to do the math and start to think “I’m only getting X dollars an hour! What the hell do I need X dollars for?”
The rest of the week I divide between school — I’m scheduled to do my PhD thesis proposal on Efficient Active Learning for Graphics and Animation next July — and a school-related programming side-project I won’t say much more about except that it’s unpaid, uncredited, time-consuming, doesn’t involve machine learning (any more), and has generally felt a bit Sisyphean.
In my copious free time, I’ve been researching, planning and preparing for my Southeast Asia trip. Only three weeks now! And I still need a new backpack, a visa for Vietnam, dental work, new glasses… This is a pretty big deal for me. As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to go to that part of the world. It will also be my first trip to the developing, non-English-speaking world. I mean, I won’t be straying too far from the regular backpacker trail, but at heart I’m just a simple lower-middle-class Saskatchewan boy who didn’t set foot outside of the prairies — or even board an airplane — until I was in my twenties, and it all seems pretty goddamned adventurous and exotic to me.
Well, I’ve been pretty busy the past week or so. Last weekend, after talking to my friend, bodyguard and travelling companion, Janelle, we decided to skip Thailand’s Aussie-packed beaches and instead some more of Southeast Asia.
My last trip (to Australia and New Zealand) was kind of about traveling around by bus, car, SUV, ferry and train, spending each night in a different place. This time, I wanted to pick a few places and spend enough time in them to get to know them. And flights in SE Asia are fairly inexpensive — you can see a lot of countries for the price of a round-trip ticket from Vancouver to Montreal.
And so, my free time for the past week or so has mostly been about researching, booking, planning and replanning. But now, at last, I think I can tell you my itinerary.
Lysychans’k December 17
Arrive in Bangkok. Sleep (it’s an 18-hour flight with a 14-hour time difference).
http://kyleschen.com/th1s_1s_a_4o4.html December 19
Take the train to Chiang Mai, an ancient city in the mountains or Northern Thailand, with walls, moats, old temples, and the like. There are lots of things to see in the area, too, like the laid-back little town of Pai.
Christmas Eve
Fly to Luang Prabang, Laos. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage City, which I gather is a good thing to be. There’s a backpacker-oriented town nearby called Vang Vieng.
New Year’s Eve
Fly to Vietnam for NYE in Hanoi. That should be interesting. Nearby are Halong Bay and Catba Island, which look astonishingly pretty.
January 3
Down to the Island of Phu Quoc, just south of Cambodia, for a few days. Apparently, the island is lovely, and still somewhat undeveloped — I could only find about ten promising-looking places to stay, several of which had rooms available.
January 7
Back to Bangkok! This time, to check it out properly for a couple of days.
January 10
Off to Japan. I need to change my ticket still, but the plan is to spend a couple of days in Yokosuka and a couple in Osaka, hanging out with various transplanted Saskatchewanians.
January 15
Back to Canada, a little richer and much more annoying for my experiences.