eric brochu

Category Archives: me

My Thesis Year

Friday, January 9, 2009

Happy New Year/Christmas/Festivus/Kwanzaa/Hanukkah, everybody!

If I were to sum up 2008 in a word — and I am about to — it was my “Worio” year. I spent the year working full-time with the Worio team on the web-page recommender system, and we have something I think we’re all fairly proud of. We demoed Worio at NIPS 2008 and got a good reception, we’ve received a bit of cautiously positive bloggage, and I’ve been awarded my first patent, for work I did with Worio.

Now it’s 2009, and I’m planning to make it my thesis year. I’m still involved with Worio, but as of January 1st, I’m no longer a full-time employee, I’m a full-time PhD candidate. Just before I went on leave to work with Worio, I defended my PhD proposal. A proposal is, essentially, an outline of what the thesis will be, and a schedule for finishing it. The idea is that if I do what I said I was planning to do, my committee has to grant me my PhD. Of course, the reality of research is ideas that seemed brilliant sometimes end up being harder that you thought, or impossible, or have already been done by other people. And at the same time, you have new ideas, or get unexpectedly good results from an experiment. So what ends up going into your thesis can look pretty different from what you said was going to go in.

I don’t know how much my thesis will end up resembling what I proposed, but I know the past year working on other projects has given me both some new ideas and also the motivation to buckle down and finish the damn thing. The conventional wisdom is that your PhD lasts until you want it to be over, and as much as I enjoy the grad-student lifestyle, I would like it to be done. I’ve spent years in academia and I’ve spent years in industry and I like industry a whole lot better. I’m also greatly looking forward to spending a while backpacking across Asia, which I’m planning to do after I finish my PhD.

So what are my goals for 2009? By the end of the year, I would like to either be done my thesis or be in the home stretch. I would like to have a couple of papers on their way to publication. I would like to see some of my research work going into a piece of real-world software like Worio, though I have a couple of ideas for projects of my own, too.

And so I may be neglecting this blog while I find a new work/school/girlfriend equilibrium. But my plan is — in addition to any other blogging I may or may not be doing — to have a longish, thesis-related post every month, kind of talking about how it’s going and what I’ve been working on. I’m not sure how interesting it will be to y’all out there, but it should be a useful exercise for me.

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Worio Public Beta is out!

Monday, December 15, 2008

At long last, I can reveal what I’ve been working on for the past year: the public beta version of Worio.com!

Worio combines search and recommendation with the philosophy that user effort should be kept to a minimum. You can simply use your favourite existing search engine, or Worio’s own, and receive recommendations based on the context of your search. But if you start to save, share and tag pages, Worio learns about your preferences and recommends pages it predicts http://kirstincronn-mills.com/?cat=37 you, personally, will be interested in.

Last week we had a combined beta release/demo at the 2008 NIPS conference at the Vancouver Hyatt, complete with Worio t-shirts foisted on everyone in range. The entire Worio Machine Learning team was there, and we were pleased with the response. NIPS is one of the most important Machine Learning conferences, and I know from personal experience that people are not shy about telling you if they don’t like your work.

Even if you’ve tried Worio in its previous incarnations, you might want to check it out again. It’s still in beta, but we’ve come a long way in just a few months. Suggestions and feature requests are most welcome.

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happy birthday, me

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Daisy	We live in a fantasy world, Tim. Weâ€™ve just constructed this fake utopia where, yâ€™know, we never get old and never have to face the responsibilities of adulthood. Weâ€™re just stretching our childhoods out as far as they can go.
Tim	Yeah, I know. We’re lucky, aren’t we?
	— Spaced (alternate ending)

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given sufficiently modest goals, anything is possible!

Friday, June 27, 2008

By last January, I was feeling pretty overweight — in fact, I was heavier than I’d been in years. So I set a goal to lose 25 lbs in the first six months of 2008. Unless I lose an arm in the next few days, I won’t make that goal, but I have lost, to date, exactly 20 lbs, and I feel a whole lot better, even if I am still a good 15 lbs too heavy. As far as I’m concerned, that counts as a win! (If there’s one thing I’m not, its a perfectionist. Or someone who is too hard on himself. Or great at sticking to a single subject.)

I noticed that after an initial, fairly quick, weight loss, I started to level out, until just the past few weeks, when I moved into my new apartment. Which is kind of odd, because I’ve only been to the gym a few times since then, and I’ve hardly gone jogging at all. But I have been walking or biking to and from work almost every day, and eating at home more. The trick, you see, is to only ever keep the Blessed Trinity of salad, coffee and tuna in the house. Happy side-effect: I can blaze through grocery shopping in about 8 minutes a week!

I was also planning to use this as an excuse to try various wacky diet and exercise plans, but to be honest, I got kind of nervous that they would detract from my slow but effective plan of eating better and getting more regular exercise. Which I know, is a whole lot more boring than trying the Shangri-La Diet (it’s gotta be good, because it was invented by a Scientist! plus, all the flax oil you can drink!). But hey, maybe in the second half of this year I’ll lose all respect for the deliciousness that is the food-eating experience. (Mmmmm… I want some laksa from Hawker’s Delight right… now.)

Tomorrow, the lovely Janelle arrives from Australia for a visit. I expect a lot more dining out and even less gym time for a while, so this will be an interesting experiment in just how well light regular exercise like the 4K walk to work holds back the really, truly fat man trapped in my only-kinda-fat man’s body. Particularly in the face of my goal of trying every restaurant on Main Street. I predict… not as well as I would like. Take that, constant struggle against obesity!

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white meat, butternut squash — welcome to the family

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

setting up whitemeat

Well, it’s something of an adjustment, this living on my own. So the first thing on my to-do list — after unpacking and walking around the living room in various states of undress unimpeded — was to surround myself with a couple of new friends. At first, I thought about getting a Roomba, but who needs that level of commitment, you know?

And so… last night I welcomed to my home White Meat and Butternut Squash. White Meat is my brand-new white MacBook. Butternut Squash is my new AirPort Extreme wireless base station. They will join Yams (my iPod Touch), Warm Gravy (my old iPod Shuffle), Brussel Spouts (my 8GB thumb drive), Pumpkin Pie (my work backup drive), Cranberry Sauce (my 750GB external hard drive), Bone & Gristle (my aging music-library drives), and the venerable Coconino (my 12″ G4 PowerBook), which will now be my permanent at-work computer while White Meat takes over the home duties.

Play nice, everybody.