Tomorrow I start working in the office of a startup down in Yaletown. I’ve been affiliated with the company for a couple of years now, and I’ll be going in to help out a bit with the Machine Learning parts of the operation. What exactly that operation is, you understand, I need to stay tantalizingly vague about, but rest assured, I may or may not be integral.
It’s just for a few weeks, but I think it’ll be pretty cool. Two of the people I’ll be working with, Mike and Reza, are from my lab. And I think it’ll be pretty cool to actually be downtown in an actual working office environment. I’ve done a bit of consulting-type work here and there since I started grad school, but it was always a matter of doing the work at home in-between my own research. This is a chance to get back to the regular software development grind that I rejected to go to grad school, but which I secretly sometimes miss.
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The house where I live at some point acquired the nickname of die Kommune, and while it’s not usually too noisy, it’s rarely entirely quiet. But right now, all of my fellow Kommunists are out of the country — David is at a wedding in London, and Abhi and Tamy are in Boston for the SIGGRAPH conference. The place seems rather eerie when I’m here alone. The nerdly grad-student industriousness grinds to a halt, the DVD player and PlayStation rest, and I get to walk around in my underwear and use the living room to sort out my books and DVDs.
All-in-all, I have to say, it’s pretty good. I have a tendency toward, shall we say, “lonerishness” — a tendency which I’ve outflanked by living in a shared house (I’m not one to brag, but I am a right cunning autotactician). It’s kind of refreshing to let my reclusive side take over and spend a weekend alone, reading, jogging and playing guitar.
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Hey, I’m back.
So I’ve switched my host from page-zone.com which seemed to delight in randomly disabling scripts and breaking installations (and had no tech support) to dreamhost.com, which I am fully confident is perfect in every way and will never cause my precious self a moment of stress or a word of complaint. Sure, it’s $3 more a month, but isn’t that worth it?
Moral: sometimes cheapest isn’t best.
At the same time, I switched my blogging software from Movable Type to WordPress. I have no good reason for doing this.
Moral: sometimes our motivations are mysteries even to ourselves.
I’m going to work on importing at least my most recent blog posts and get the site looking and working like I want it, but it will probably take a few days/weeks before I get everything going perfectly.
There’s no moral there.
So I’ve been pretty focused and Interweb-less the past couple of weeks. I have some deadlines looming, a couple of recently-scrapped projects behind me, and various other demands of my time. Yesterday, after a morning full of meetings, I spent about ten hours straight trying unsuccessfully to implement an optimization algorithm. I walked home, tired and frustrated, in full-on zombie mode. And Ty, Gill and I watched this video of bouncing Japanese kids playing the Saber Dance.
About three times in a row.
It was sublime.
Link (thanks to Tyson)
Paul Erdős (1913-1996) was a mathematician probably most famous for being nothing but a mathematician, eccentric and brilliant even by the standards of that breed. He published over 1500 papers during his life, while for years he lived without any permanent address. He would crash with mathematician friends of his while collaborating, fueled by a diet of coffee and amphetamines, and occasionally collecting cash prizes for solving outstanding problems in math.
Because he was so prolific and published so widely, as a tribute, his friends created the “ErdÅ‘s number“, a kind of nerd version of the Kevin Bacon game. ErdÅ‘s has a number of 0. People he co-authored papers with have a 1. People who co-authored papers with them have a 2, and so on. My ErdÅ‘s Number, as near as I can determine, is 5.
That’s right, ladies: Pagani five.
- Paul Erdös, F Harary and Maria Klawe. 1980. Residually complete graphs. Combinatorial mathematics, optimal designs and their applications, Proceedings of a Symposium on Combinatorial Mathematics and Optimal Design; Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, 1978, Annals of Discrete Mathematics 6, 1980:117-123
- K Inkpen, Kellogg S Booth, S D Gribble and Maria Klawe. 1995. Give and take: Children collaborating on one computer. CHI’95 Conference Companion, (Denver, Colorado).
- A Csinger, Kellogg S Booth and David Poole. 1994. AI Meets Authoring: User models for untelligent multimedia. Artificial Intelligence Review. Springer Netherlands. 8(5-6):447-468.
- P Carbonetto, J Kisynski, Nando de Freitas and David Poole. 2005. Nonparametric Bayesian Logic. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 2005.
- Eric Brochu, Nando de Freitas and Kejie Bao. 2003. The Sound of an Album Cover: Probabilistic Multimedia and AI. AI-STATS 2003.
Actually, having a number of 5 isn’t particularly noteworthy, even for a student. What I think is interesting is the way that the connections spread not just through authors, but through fields. The first paper is a math paper. The second is about human-computer interaction (HCI): research on the way people use computers. The third is on user-modelling, which combines HCI and AI. The fourth paper is a stats-oriented AI paper, as is the fifth one (mine), though my focus is not theoretical, but applied. By this point we’re a very long way from the pure math of Paul ErdÅ‘s. I kind of like the idea of different branches of research being so tightly networked together.