Quiet Reading

Nothing happened during the Easter holiday. I read and read, really enjoy the papers I read. I am more and more attracted by the pure research.

Critical Thinking in Life

Critical thinking is a necessary attribute a researcher. When you do critical thinking, there is no boundary that you cannot challenge. And you exam the facts against what you believe. Can this character make me expelled by the reality of the society? I do not know. I sometimes can not tell how I can balance between the reality and the idealism. I always hold a very high standard on the things I engage, and of course on myself. Maybe this makes my surrounding people unhappy. I do not know. But when time comes, I am still able to shout to people and fight for what I believe correct. I shouted to people for my visit to IRISA. Not to individual, but to the principles of running the institute. Maybe I am too idealistic. And I am more and more idealistic. Finally I got approval to go. I will have a non-boring summer in France, with whole time for research and interesting people. That is all I want.

IJCAI05 paper

I am so glad that our IJCAI submission is accepted. The accept rate is 18% (240/1329). Thanks to Martin Brooks and Daniel Lemire. They are great mathematicians. I’ve learned a lot from them. They are also fantastic people. I really enjoy working with them. It is the best paper I published after studying MBR and QR for 3 years. Now I can put the draft online. This is not the final version yet. We received very rigor reviews. We will revise our paper for the final submission.

OISEE project

OISEE project is to use Web Services for Online Experiments. We published three papers this year and set up a prototype system. It is an area not well studies, but with potential impact on e-learning. I am thinking what to do in order to commercialize part of our techniques. Maybe that is not fair to run all this as a researcher. We meet a whole team to work on it.
1) Put a demo system online.
2) More PR and marketing work, e.g. writing to relevant companies and universities
3) Demonstration on conferences and meet people, such as Ed-Media05 in Montreal
4) More papers for academic impact.

My Colloquium in NRC Ottawa

My colloquium titled “Qualitative Reasoning and Qualitative Model Abstraction” went fine in NRC-IIT in Ottawa. I had efficient discussions with several people from Integration Reasoning group. We found two things we can investigate: using qualitative operation to compress time series data; reengineering the system model from machine learning results using qualitative reasoning. These are very interesting topics. And the later one, if feasible, would be a break through.

Martin Brooks is a fantastic guy by all means. I like his research and like his personality too. Maybe that is not fair that many less talented people got more recognition than him. But for an excellent mind, he would not care this. He is a cool and happy man.

Don't Become a Scientist!

Here is a same titled article at http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html, by Jonathan Katz, Professor of Physics at Washington University, complaining how the scientist career away from the ideals and how difficult for young scientists to have decent life. I like this statement:

“Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.”

Whenever I met students who want to have a ph.d., I would ask them, do you really want it if I tell you the truth? Many students tell me that a scientist can be free to think anything and achieve what they think so that is the ideal life for them. But the truth is this career has too much harshness to be free. My Friend Daniel, a pessimist, has many posters recently about it. I agree with him on this issue though.