Yes. The chaos does, in fact, keep on coming. However, that is the way I like it. Managing chaos is part of my job and if my job weren’t chaotic, I don’t think it would be quite so exciting. But let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?
It’s been almost two months since I last wrote, and that time frame encompassed what most people consider to be “Christmas Break.” Of course, I’ve long since believed in vacations, but I resolved that in the two and a half weeks for which I was in NJ, I wouldn’t work on lab work. That almost worked out. I flew east on Dec. 16th and managed to avoid working for the lab until Dec. 25th. Yes. I did, in fact, work on Christmas Day.
After that, it was all over. Even though I was skiing in Quebec for the next week, I would check in with the lab before and after skiing and after dinner. All hell had essentially broken loose, eventually culminating in the lab manager stepping down toward the end of the first day that I was back in the lab (Jan. 5th)
Since then, I’ve taken slightly more of a management role in the lab, both out of necessity and because people seem to think I’m a good person to give status reports to. I can’t complain; they’re probably right, considering I talk to both Terry (my advisor and CEO/CTO/half-owner of Securics, Inc., our main collaborator and “customer”) and Walter (friend, person who recruited me here, and Director of Research and Development at Securics, as well as being the most recent Ph. D. produced by the lab) more than anyone else in the lab and likely more than the rest of them combined. Officially, the management effort is mostly a system of a team managing teams. Terry, our postdoc (back from his last excursion to Canada), myself, the lab sysadmin, and the lab “Web Team” Lead comprise the leadership “team” and each of the three grad students lead a subset of the lab, with my “team” being ill-defined and thus essentially comprising much of the research portion of the lab.
Aside from management (I try to keep the time spent “managing” to a minimum so I can get at least 40 hours [the maximum per week I can bill] of research done. That usually isn’t a problem, since I’m usually in the lab for ~10 hours on weekdays and 6-8 hours on Saturdays — I’m trying to take Sundays off from lab work to finish up some of the half-started projects I’ve been working on in all that free time I don’t have; that’s worked to varying degrees over the past few weeks), I’m working on several research projects, which should culminate in three papers in March (one for a journal special issue and two for a conference) and a fourth paper at the end of May. All four center around expanding on the research in my last paper (we should hear back from our reviewers this comng Friday) on face recognition in blurry conditions.
In addition, I am taking more classes (6 credits down, 6 credits in progress, 36 to go) which may actually be fun this semester. “Machine Learning” is a research-oriented class, so I’ll have an opportunity to write about some brain-inspired approaches to the current trend in Machine Learning classifiers, the Support Vector Machine. My other class is “Scientific Computation” is a course offered by a Romanian professor from the Math department in the numerical analysis of Partial Differential Equations, which may not be applicable as “Machine Learning” but will still be fun.
Finally, I promised (several months ago) a picture of my bike, so that’s this post’s picture. Click it to view a bigger version. The computer behind it is a Quad-coure Xeon (hyper-threaded) with 12GB of RAM that I run my experiments on. It’s got some pep and makes me realize that my network (running on mostly single-core Pentium IIIs) really is stuck in the stone age.
P. S.: I’ve been thinking of making this slightly more automated, running off text files so I don’t have to manually write HTML every time I want to update this. That might make updates more regular. I may implement that this weekend. This would also allow me to (eventually) implement an RSS feed, for those of you who are too lazy to check a web site periodically (I know I fall into that category)