cat /proc/claus

I’m getting absolutely tired of this computer screen. For the past month I have been trying to write an article for a specific journal at the request of my professor. The biggest problem is that I JUST had a paper accepted in another journal, so I didn’t really have any new results to publish. I had to set up new experiments in a hurry to test for some theories and methods we were thinking about, but everything was rushed and slapped together with spit and glue.

At least, the deadline is two days ahead of me - I only have about 60% of the experiments completed. I have spend most of the previous week writing the “meat” of the paper and trying to fix the experiments, but by now I have mostly given up, and I’m just trying to write a paper which is good enough not to be thrown out at the first round of reviews, and do the real fixing in the second submission. This is extremely demoralizing.

At the moment I have finished all the coding that I’m willing to do, and run the experiments and see what comes out. I can’t wait to take my life back into my hands; so much to do which is being wasted away by the stress with this paper :-/

A few days ago, I took 20 minutes when I was bored and not really able to concentrate on my work, to set up a webcam feed to my laboratory desk. Here is the setup, for those interested (this is very basic stuff, but may interest those who are still beginning to explore their computers):

Ingredients:

• An ubuntu box connected to the lan - root access (my computer)
• A debian box connected to the internets - no root access (the lab’s web server)
• A logitech webcam (forgot the exact model right now)

How to prepare:
A few years ago, I read many terrifying reports about the state of webcam support on linux. Seems that those dark ages are over, because my ubuntu box recognized my rather old webcam with no intervention from my part.

I apt-get’ed the “webcam” package in my personal box. The binary takes pictures from the webcam at regular intervals (settable in the .rc), and saves it to the indicated place in the filesystem. It has an option to automatically upload the picture via ssh or ftp, but that requires either leaving the password in plain text in the configuration file, or manually entering the password all the time, neither of which are acceptable alternatives.

So instead I installed apache at my machine, and saved the picture from “webcam” into the www folder. I would find a way to grab it from the server machine. The simplest way to do it is to use wget. At first I put wget into the crontab file, but the lowest resolution of the crontab file was 1-minute updates, and I was aiming for 5-second updates.

So instead, I created a small script:

while [ 0 -lt 1 ]
do
wget -q mybox myboxaddress/picture.jpg -O public_html/picture.jpg
sleep 5
done


And left that script running in the background (under nohup, so that it wouldn’t be ended after I logged off the computer).

Now, I have a picture in my public page which refreshes every 5 seconds - I just need an autorefreshing page to go with it (because clicking the refresh button all the time is boring). The way to do this in pure html is to add the following tag in your “head” section:

meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5″

(this must be in brackets, but silly wordpress won’t let me do it )

This tells the browser to automatically refresh the page every 5 seconds - don’t make your page too heavy!

And there you go! You’re really to be the new Jennycam!

Now I just need to use all this energy to finish my paper

Comments
This is a very simple and somewhat crude solution. The shell script to wget/sleep particularly bothers me. If anyone has a more elegant solution (maybe the reloading webpage grabs the picture from my box when requested via php? Which would be more computationally expensive?) I would like to hear it.

Today Professor Lee Spector, , a well known researcher in the field of Evolutionary Computation, came to visit Iba Laboratory. The plan was to give him a demonstration of our research work, then listen to a talk from him, and then a dinner at a nearby traditional restaurant.

The whole day was delightful, and very inspiring. Professor Lee has what the japanese call “playful heart” (遊び心), which means that he really seems to take joy in letting his imagination roam free in his ideas. Talking to him reminded me of how fun it is to do research about GA/GP - taking a computer and making it learn things in a totally emergent fashion. One part that rekindled my interest was when he talked about “getting people from other fields to share a beer with you”, to get them to tell you their problems, so you could try to solve them with GP. It reminds me of what I used to think about CS, in which it is a tool for other sciences to achieve nice things, and not an end to itself - another lesson which I need to remind myself of. It was also quite a Feynman-ish thing to say. The technical contents of his talk were two very simple GP ideas that could be easily implemented and tested in our systems - his main point was that GP needs more simple ideas than extra complex systems.

I got to play tour guide and take his family around the University of Tokyo, and that was really refreshing. I was surprised about how much they knew about his work - It got myself thinking that this was the kind of familiar/professional position I would like to see myself 10-15 years from now.

Now to go back to my papers and start working towards this direction

• This week I got from the City Office a notice asking me to renew my Alien Registration Card (Gaijin Tourokusho). The Alien Card is a document which the Japanese Gov. issues for all foreigners living in Japan. Its possession on your person is obligatory at all times, and it is a point of contention which isn’t really the point of this post. Once my mother told me that a sign of the passing of the time was when she had to renew her driver’s license, which are issued for 5 or 10 years in Brazil. When I got the letter for the Office, I felt the same way - the fact that finally came the time for me to renew my Alien card was a small sign of how long I have already been living here. (The renewal process itself is fairly painless - just bring a couple of pictures to print a new card).
• Talking about how long, last week was my birthday. I held two small parties, on saturday and sunday, so I could accomodate more people at my apartment, and both were quite fun. On saturday I made strogonoff, and on sunday I tried to bake a cake, but managed to burn my mixer (the cake still came through). On both days we played plenty of Mario Kart wii, and board games, like Carcassone, Munchkin and Texas Hold’em. Pics Here.
• Saturday, Hugo commented that it would be almost one year already since we started playing 4th Edition. I really didn’t see that time passing by.

While my official graduation estimate is October 2010 (15 months from now), I have been recently informed that I actually have to finish the most important parts of my thesis by January (7 months from now). This news fell on me like a sack of bricks, with the newfound realization that I have to seriously step up my research efforts (I can only hope this also means that I get a more relaxed pace after January).

This is as great a time as ever to get stumped in my research. I just reached a snag that I have been trying to think my way out of the whole week, without much success. Here is the story:

So far, I have developed a novel computational method to the “Portfolio Optimization Problem”, which is financial problem, and also a specific subclass of the Parameter Optimization Problem. Now, my method has achieved results which are much better than anything currently out there, and I managed to produce quite a few good publications from these experiments. But that can only go so far.

The next step would either be to focus myself more on the Portfolio Optimization Problem, or to try and generalize my method to a broader category of Parameter Optimization Problems. The first, while a worthwhile area of research, is not exactly what I find myself doing for the rest of my life - the financial market does not attract that much of my interest. If I were to follow this, I would have to study economy to a degree I don’t really think I’m willing to put up with.

The second option is more the kind of thing that I want: Theoretical research. If I can modify my algorithm to solve a wider variety of problems efficiently, I can maybe learn something about the nature of this category of problems, or of algorithms like mine, and talk about that. This kind of general, theoretic research which makes my brain jog and exercise is what I really like to think of myself as doing. So I’m trying to follow the second path.

Problem is, it seems that my method has its good results because it is REALLY fine tuned to the specific characteristics of the Portfolio Optimization Problem. I’m trying as hard as I can to generalize the algorithms to problems that don’t share some/all of those characteristics/restrictions, and although I had a few good ideas, all methods I have come up with so far have been too complicated and inelegant. Normally, I could just try to scrape this method completely and try anew, but the fact that I have only 7 months to prepare and write my thesis, and that I already have 21 months of work in my previous method that I should be using on it makes this alternative not very attractive.

So either I come up with some great idea in the next two weeks or so, or I’ll gave to go down the first path, at least for my phd, and hope I can turn around in time to do some work I like in my post-doc/profession.

At times like this I would like to still have my old professors, LM and Wainer, with whom I could sit a whole hour, bouncing ideas back and forth. Well, I have a lab meeting next Tuesday, where I am suppose to present my research progress… That will have to do. Hopefully I can come up with enough silly ideas until them so that I’ll be able to spark a brainstorm session during the meeting.

(I know I have been deliberately vague with the details of my work - this is what you have when you’re in the academic world with a paper down the pipeline. Mail me if you are interested in details.)