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 :-P

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.