cat /proc/claus

Tomorrow I’m taking the plane to Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, to take part in the “Genetic Programming Theory and Practice” workshop. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity - there will be some of the bigger names in GP theory participating, and the structure of the workshop (few participants, lots of time for presentation and discussion) means that I may actually get the chance to pick their brains for a bit, instead of the normal “big conference” environment where when someone moderately famous makes a talk, everyone rushes to try and talk to them and you are lucky to get a question through.

With some luck, I might even manage to bring up the subject of Post-Doc positions *g* — BTW, I finally got my first serious proposals these days, but it is top secret, don’t bother asking :-).

Logistically, the trip is all set up. I’ll leave tomorrow and return on the 24th — not that it will make a big difference for the pacing of this blog. Recently I have been mostly posting personal stuff to Facebook, and news/research stuff to twitter. I’ll be staying at two couchsurfer’s place — hope the karma pays off :-), and I have printed a small list of Geocaches I want to find during the trip, time permitting. The only part which is a bit uncertain is how I will get from the airport to Ann Arbour — it seems that A2 does not have an international airport (or even a big local one), so I have to get off in Detroit and, this being the US, I can’t take a bus/train from the airport to the city - I need to book a shuttle in advance (which I couldn’t do, since most shuttles only take reservation by phone, none answered my e-mails), or pay 50 dollars for a cab - five times what I would pay for an express train Narita-Tokyo, which is about double the distance. So who said Japan is expensive again?

And don’t get me started on the medieval flight security in US airports…

As an aside, I have finally finished all the experiments and most of the analysis required for the “final” revision of my thesis. I kinda hesitate to use final (hence the “”), since there is a lot of stuff which I’m not satisfied with and would like more time to work on, but it should be enough data to satisfy the defense committee (based on their review of my first defense). So in the next 23 days until the deadline, all I gotta do is edit this data into new sections and improve some of the old ones.

So, finally, I’m done with my “Test” Thesis Defence. For those not used to the Japanese system of graduate studies, six months before you graduate, you need to perform a “mock examination”, where you do your thesis Defence in the same conditions as your final Defence, including to the same commitee. This committee will judge whether your work should be “ready” by the end of the following six months, and tell you what they think you need to do to complete your thesis.

Unlike many of the “rituals” of Japanese academia, this is one that I don’t find to be completely useless. The professors don’t read your thesis anyway, but at least they have the chance to make some serious questions to your work, and you have the chance to address those questions, which makes a kind of “building together” feeling which pleases me.

So most of my late December and all of January was spent preparing for it, a time where almost all of my other activities where stopped or cancelled. But it was actually worth it. I managed to get rid of 90% of the “drudge” of my thesis, and stablish all that had already been done. The presentation itself was much lighter than I expected, the professors liked my thesis and my results, which gave me a boost in confidence. Instead of making any big criticisms of my thesis, they all just suggested extensions to lines of research that I had already drawn out in the first place.

Now, after a month and a half in this backbreaking pace, I go back to “almost” my normal routine. I got two papers I have to finish by the end of march, so the idea is to do experiments now in Feb, and writing the results next month. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I’m now on “job hunting” season, which means getting my shit together to find out and apply to a few nice places to a post-doc/professor/researcher position. Of course, I also have to finish the changes to my thesis, but I got at least 4 months after these papers, so that is on hold. On the personal side, I want to return to regular geocaching, reading books, bi-weekly RPG games, and python programming. And writing a dozen of late blog articles I wanted to write about.

Heh, maybe I don’t have so much free time as I thought I would, but this is looking like a very interesting last year in Japan, if I can keep myself from procastinating too heavily

Today in the University meeting my professor told me that my pre-thesis defense will consist of an one hour presentation, followed by an one hour Q&A session. Since my Master Thesis presentation 2 years ago here in Tokyo university was a paltry 20 minutes, I was both relieved and a bit apprehensive. I was thinking that maybe one hour was a bit too much (I was expecting more like 40 minutes), but talking to Y I realized that among the three techniques and two problem I will have to explain and discuss at length, one hour might even be too little. Anyway, I’m breathing a little easier now that I know exactly how much time I have available - now I just need to do the work. I just wished they would give me the damn deadline already so I could prepare my schedule better.

Also, In today’s meeting we had visitors from another laboratory which presented to us their research on DNA computing. DNA computing is a sort of wet computing where you use the chemical reactions between DNA strands as the processing units. They were explaining their work in developing an AND gate with DNA. To be honest, I was not very impressed. I had heard before of wet computing before (maybe chemical computing?), and in my mind the state of art in this was a bit more evolved. But in their presentation, one AND operation would take more than one hour to complete, and they would need to do the experiment from scratch to change the data inputs. I wasn’t very convinced (although the rain might have made me grumpier than usual). Either you try to emulate electro-mechanical computing, but do it faster, or you get some new operators to do different stuff (like quantum computing). Could someone enlighten me about what I’m missing here?

In other news, RPG game tomorrow, and I got a pretty neat series of encounters for my players. Report coming from Sunday on

With a little less than 1 year to finish my PhD, the chief complaint from my advisor about my project is that, while my methodology has produced very good results, I have applied it to only one problem domain: Portfolio Optimization. While I have been making analysis and hybrids of my technique that have given me small differential gains in performance, what I really need is to find out other problem domains where I could apply my technique, to demonstrate its generality.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy as it seems. My MTGA, in short, was made for bounded parameter optimization problems. This means a problem that can be described as: “you have a value, X, which must be divided among Y variables (sum of all Y is X)”. The problem is that most benchmark functions for parameter optimization are not bounded. I have to assign the values of Y, but they are not bounded by an X sum. I tried to get around that by adding a “dump” variable which would get the remaining value of X, but that breaks down because I still need to know the max X, negative values make everything go wonky.

In my current research, X is the total resource available for investiment, and Y are the different assets that I can invest that resource into. If you can describe your research problem (in any field, no need to be remotely related to computing) in terms of this X and Y, I would love to hear about it!

After about three weeks of pretty good weather, it is raining again in Tokyo. I have a love-hate relationship with the rain, which includes much more hate than love, actually :-/. Walking out on the rain, with an umbrella over my head, makes all those blue, depressing feelings and thoughts assault me. I can’t really go by bike, so I have to take the train (and spend money), or walk all the way to school, and get my feed wet and my socks ruined. The only time I like the rain, and at those times I really like it, is when I can afford to stay at home, reading a book, enjoying the sound and smell of the rain outside from the safety of my roof.

By the way, yesterday I finished reading “Salt: A World History”. It is a good book, full of interesting information. But even as a non-fiction book, I felt it could have used a “conclusion”, “summary” or something - the end of the book just came really abruptly.

Anyway, today I cannot afford to stay at home and read. I have to go to the university to help fixing the study space of the new Post Doc student. Which is about the only thing that I really need to be at uni to do - most everything else I can download to my laptop and do here, but I’m not really feeling like studying at home today - maybe because of the rain, or because my home is a mess.

Of the stuff I could download and do here at home, I have the translation of the Robotic Science survey paper - the person I’m collaborating with asked me again today when I’m gonna finish it, and in fact, it has stopped for at least three weeks now I’m kinda losing my hopes with this one - maybe I’ll have to pull the plug on it. I also have to port my recently submitted paper to a smaller format to a japanese conference. I have a bunch of experiments to start for the next leg of my research. My professor asked me also to find a new application for my methodology. I have two journal papers to review. And last but not least, my mid-term thesis defense is still sitting in its corner in my desk, eyeing me hungrily.

Gah.