cat /proc/claus

So I started my work as an assistant professor yesterday.

The first day was quite uneventful. No big introductions or nomikais (whew!). My supervisor said hi and talked to me for a bit, then the secretary took me around the department and had me sign a large bunch of paper. I got a formal “you are hired” speech from the dean. Then I was shown my own room.

It is a large room, with a great view of Mount Tsukuba from the 8th floor. It is also completely barren and dusty. I felt like the beginning of a “harvest moon” game, when you are left at an abandoned plot of land, to make the best of it that you can. To be honest, I was quite excited about all this — harvest moon is exactly my kind of game.

Today (the second day), was a bit more interesting. My supervisor had some more time, and used some of it to explain what is expected of me in more details. It seems that my job will consist of providing support and managing the G30 initiative in the University of Tsukuba. In more concrete terms, I have to provide intensive courses for the students in the G30 major (for starters Machine Learning in October, High Performance Parallel Computing in December). Also, I have to try and attract more students to this course, both in the university of Tsukuba and other universities in Japan (through long distance classes, etc). Finally, I have to boost the goal of the G30 program to turn Tsukuba into a more International university, by attracting more foreign students, and trying to promote cooperation with other universities abroad.

It is all still a bit nebulous to me, but I can see that I will have a handful.

Oh, research? It seems that I can do pretty much whatever I want in that regard - as long as I find the time to.Today I already took part in an impromptu research discussion about one of the master students projects over coffee, and tried to sell EC to him.

Plans for tomorrow: Cleaning my office by removing the logs and large rocks from it :3

After almost one year and a half living in Rio, tomorrow I’m boarding for Japan. I’ve been hired as an Assistant Professor at the G30 Computational Science Program at Tsukuba University.

I’m looking forward a lot for this move. For me, more than any “january first”, this signals a new year. Moving has always been accompained by a rush of productivity and energy, and I have been planning to use these to start (or re-start) a number of projects that were on the back burner. The things I want to do in this new start include: Going back to the Gym, getting better at Starcraft, Learning to program indie games, reading more technical books. Not to mention updating all my websites

This last year in Rio was great from an academic point of view. I had a very interesting research project, with awesome work mates. I will miss that. But I also look forward to my new position. The prospect of having students under me, and a bit more of academic freedom gives me all sorts of ideas to work with.

SMBC is among the comics that I read on a regular basis. As a friend of mine expertly described, SMBC strips are either absolutely inane, or absolutely genial — no in-betweens. Yesterday they published this one:

The sad thing about this strip is that not only it is absolutely correct about the ¨pundit thinking¨, but it is also absolutely incorrect about scientists not using it. In my academic life I have often read papers where statements are made based solely on the ¨I thought about it many times¨ reasoning. It is not malice; when your job is to think many ideas, and then put those ideas to test through experimentation, it is really hard not to get enamored to some of your more fascinating intellectual children. To put your beliefs through the ¨do I think this is true just because I thought it cool¨ test is a skill that must be developed and kept in practice, because it is not natural to our pattern-loving brain processes.

Today I had a meeting with my supervisor, where we spent a long time discussing research ideas (among other things). It was nice that I think I managed to impress them with my progress on the study tasks assigned to me last week. It was bad because since they were impressed with my progress on the study tasks assigned to me last week, I was given double the work to do this week

Not that bad, actually. We were discussing a classification problem, and I suggested the use of GP to get the feature selection automatically, the actual problem he had me thinking about. Then he raised the issue of 2D visualization of high dimensional data sets, and I mentioned the work I did in the past on Ant Clustering — and he and the other post doc found it an intriguing idea. Even when I explained that I had hit a wall a few years before, but other people have picked up the work since them, they were still interested.

So my supervisor asked me to prepare a presentation fleshing out my ideas for this Thursday. He even called the meeting for the afternoon so “I could have an extra morning to prepare”. Hooray. I mean, it is exciting to work on a hard, relevant, interesting, real world problem, and to revisit Swarm Intelligence, a field that I adore. But I’m wondering if I can keep up the pace. That’s part of the picture I drew of myself as a scientist oh so many years ago, though.

On a side note, I finally got a review from a paper I submitted in January. I had all but forgotten about this Journal publication, but the reviewers were fairly clement - even if they requested “major revisions”. So I guess I will have a Journal Publication for 2010! (or possibly early 2011). Yay! Now I need to publish my “Thesis Paper” and finish my book to close the parenthesis opened in Tokyo.

Well, that was a dry progress report. I have more interesting things to say about Rio in the pipeline (like a post comparing prices between Japan and Brazil), but it is almost 2:00 am already.

Today I went to meet my new supervisor and visit the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

First things first: Riding a Bus in Rio is as exciting as riding the roller coaster! It is a 40 min ride from my apartment to the university, and I was hoping to play sudoku on my way there, but with the speed, sharp turns, and bumps of the ride, no way that I could control a pen! So I’ll have to look for something else to do (maybe I should look into this podcast thingy).

My new advisor is a VERY friendly guy. He gave me a tour of the COPPE building and we would stop every few meters walking down the halls to greet somebody - a student, a professor, a staff member. So different from my experience in Tokyo U., where professors and students would rarely talk unless they had business to attend to! Something else that made an impression on me is how everyone talks about soccer all the time - I thought it was just a stereotype, but everyone in Rio seems to be crazy about their soccer teams. My supervisor and his other pos doc were hotly discussing which team I should cheer for.

Prices in the university restaurants are compatible with prices in university cantinas in Tokyo. The number of undergrad students walking around, gathering, talking, and loudly studying outside impressed me. I remember how it was when I was an undergrad myself in Campinas, but I may have grow unaccustomed to it since studying in Tokyo U.

I don’t get to have my own desk or my own locker - this disappointed me a bit. It seems hard to me to make a emotional link to your workplace if you don’t have your own space in the organization. Also, it would be very good to be able to leave all my working materials in the university and not worry about lugging them back and forth.

On the other hand, I already have plenty to work to do. My supervisor’s line of work involves the data classification, using data from a “Flux Citometer”, a machine that calculates a lot of medical information by throwing laser beams at cells. Pretty cool. So some problems related to this research were thrown at me for thinking, then they asked me to read two related papers. Then a book that will be needed for some classes I might be giving next year. Then I was also asked to make a presentation on my PhD research two weeks from now.

And then, as if this is not enough, my supervisor introduced me to another professor that has similar research interests as mine, so that we can see if we can work together on something.

Oh, and I still have to learn Matlab! (at least the lab’s machines all have Matlab for Linux already installed).

This was a full and intense day, and the week promises not to let up the pressure - but since I was complaining that my vacations were stretching, the change is welcome!