I suppose it’s about time I posted an update since it’s been five weeks since the last post. In case it wasn’t assumed, I’ve been extremely busy, with paper deadlines for three meetings (two workshops and a conference). I ended up not submitting anything to the conference (ECCV), though two of my colleagues submitted papers that somehow (surprisingly) got rejected from CVPR. However, I did end up submitting three papers in total over the past week and a half: the paper that got terrible reviews from the CVPR reviewers got a makeover and was submitted to the IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Biometrics along with a new paper that got written (in surprsingly good shape) in a week and a half; and another paper on some stuff we’ve been doing for quite a while with modeling of synthetic and semi-synthetic data was submitted to Analysis and Modeling of Face and Gesture. Both workshops are in conjunction with CVPR, so I may get to go to San Francisco after all. I am third author on the AMFG paper and second author on both of the others, so I still have yet to be primary author on a paper, but I’m not all that concerned about that, as Terry and I are working on finding ways for me to do research on topics we don’t specifically have funding for, particularly with respect to the neuroscience of vision leading to the computational neuroscience of vision, which is what I’d eventually like to do my dissertation on. But enough of the school stuff…
One of the weeks I purchased and took delivery of some new computer parts, including a set of five 1.5TB hard disks and an enclosure for them to upgrade my storage from 1TB (unformatted) to 6TB (unformatted). I also ebay’d a cheap dell desktop machine that was just old enough to be cheap but still new enough to have all the right connectors for my video card (two DVI out, but otherwise nothing special) and the three disks of my old (1TB) storage setup.
Another of the weeks I had a fairly irritating head cold that broke up my day into several small chunks as opposed to the usual long waking stint followed by requisite sleep. That was, I think, three weeks ago, also the week after I got the computer parts. Since then, my sleep schedule’s been thrown off because of the whole paper deadline scramble, so I’ve been waking up at 8:30 and getting to lab by 10:30 or so, instead of my much-preferred 6:30 alarm to get to the lab by around 8:00. That means that, by the time class rolls around at 4:30, i’ve had an 8.5 hour day. That way, if I stay for another hour and a half after class (which is usually the case anyway), that’s a good 10-hour day and I still have time left (on that schedule, I’d get home around 7:30) to do other stuff in the evenings and still get 8 hours of sleep.
In still other news, Synaptogenesis Network Technologies might be returning from its temporary sleep, likely in the form of a software company. I started a few projects based on opportunity in the realm of clinical chiropractic neurology, thanks to my father, over Christmas/Winter break, but, because of the mountains of work I’ve been involved with here, haven’t yet had the chance to do all that much in the way of finishing them and/or putting the final touches on them.
In all that free time I don’t have, I’ve been reading <a href=”http://www.jonahlehrer.com>Jonah Lehrer</a>’s new book, How We Decide, which, like his earlier book (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) describes relatively recent discoveries in neuroscience from the perspective of fairly common stories that we don’t usually connect with neural science. It’s not a very technical read, but it has plenty of references to recent publications in the field for those whose curiosities are piqued. After that on my list of books to read are In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel and Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. Both authors are well-known in theire respective fields and I expect both books to be enjoyable and informative reads.
While I’m on the topic of Jonah Lehrer and reading, he’s also got a blog called The Frontal Cortex that he updates fairly regularly. He also recently had an article in the New York Times about the importance of dreams, which can be seen somewhat as a follow-up to this article about insomnia.
I may start doing something similar to aggregrate the ideas I have, the research I’m doing, and the books and other literature that I’m reading, depending on how much time I have, but don’t hold your breath, at least not until I start writing my dissertation. Then I might have more to write about and, thus, hopefully do it more often. For now, I’ll try to be more consistent about updating this blog….we’ll see what happens.