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Category Archives: General

Magritte Thoughts

03-Mar-07

Went to see the Magritte exhibit at LACMA today. Thoughts: I’d never thought of the parallels between The Red Model and cyborgs/cybernetic enhancement before =). Likewise, I stared at The Human Condition for a good 20 minutes, and couldn’t help but thinking about AI agents and World Models Everything in the Treachery of Images section […]

Darjeeling Oolongs

28-Feb-07

As a break from Artificial Intelligence ponderings, I was recently mailed a sampler of darjeeling oolong teas so that I could participate in an “on-line tasting”. Thanks to T-Ching, and Phyll Sheng for arranging the tasting. And, finally, a huge thanks to Lochan Tea for providing the leaves, and for pioneering this new form of […]

“Where is my cure for this disease?”

12-Feb-07

Thinking a bit about AI this weekend. 30 years ago, we tried to imagine what life would be like in 2010. Intelligent Agents, Strong AI, etc etc. It’s a bit disheartening that the pinnacle of AI that we have to show for our efforts are things like PageRank and phrase-based statistical machine translation. Not to […]

Building a Smarter Feedreader

10-Feb-07

I ran across Leonard Richardson’s Ultra Gleeper again yesterday. I hadn’t seen it for a year, and it’s been good looking at it with new eyes since I’ve begun hacking in earnest on machine learning problems and measuring “interestingness” of RSS posts. The project is interesting because he aims to solve the same problem I […]

Car Buying

07-Feb-07

Bought a car over the last two weekends, and it was surprisingly painless. Here’s the 4-step process: 2 weekends ago we set aside Sunday afternoon to see what make/model/color/options we wanted. We knew we weren’t going to buy anything that weekend, just see exactly what we wanted. Having decided on a Civic, we compiled a […]

Visualization of Academic Papers

01-Feb-07

Earlier this morning found a wonderful bit of information visualization, graphing the patterns in academic publication over 3 centuries (!). Chris Harrison‘s “Visualizing the Royal Society Archive” (found via Information Aesthetics). Beautiful graphs. I have a little criticism for his methodology (why not remove stop words? why graph on a 45 degree slant? why not […]

Yawn.

05-Jan-07

**jetlagged**.

phew

29-Dec-06

the last few weeks have been nonstop. First it was an excellent conference on computer aided language learning, hosted by the computational linguistics folks over at Ohio State University. Lots of interesting ideas gleaned and interesting people met. Perhaps more on this later Then it was 2.5 days back in Los Angeles, enough time to […]

Finishing up the semester.

04-Dec-06

Finished up a semester of TAing. I really like teaching, so immediately rewarding, to see minds grow week by week. Research is so long-term by contrast (start working on a problem, get good results after 3 months, publish after 6 months). Signed Google’s job offer last week (will be working in their Santa Monica location […]

Grassroots Journalism

14-Nov-06

A friend of mine went to Korea this last summertime, and took an amazing bunch of pictures. It struck me as I was browsing them: these are not just vacation photos to be filed away, they are of high enough quality to appear in most any mainstream publication. I look forward to the day when […]