Catching Up/Getting Ahead

It's been a while because I haven't yet gotten through my thick skull that blogging more frequently might actually assist me in keeping my thoughts straight about the various projects I'm working on. This semester started all of two weeks ago, and things haven't really started to kick in full gear yet as far as academics are concerned, though I've been out of town for the last two weekends and have two more social engagements on the next two weekends, and then get to take a plane to my first ever real-computer-science-conference.

What? I never posted here about that? Right, well the poster paper on Paper-to-Parameters was accepted to UbiComp. On September 25th, I take my first international flight using my first passport(which cost me way too much money), to go to the first conference where my first paper ever will be published. I've spent a lot of time in the last week working on the poster, and working considerably harder since realizing that this may very well be a conference I'll want to be taken seriously at when I'm working the angles on my thesis.

Question to be asked at the department sometime soon: can we publish partial parts of our PhD research in a similar way to how the work we're doing right now is being published as a WiP in a couple of conference before the final paper is published? I really don't know these things at UIC yet, and I have a feeling it could be critical.

I'm planning on applying to the NSFGRF program this year. Getting accepted means some $30,000 a year stipend, along with an allotted tuition waiver, as well as travel assistance. It would also mean free time to actually do my research without having to work for someone else. The other nice thing about the NSFGRF is that it basically sets me up to get background work done for my thesis and to put some really intense thought into what I want to do and how I would do it. It's basically a mini-grant proposal. I'm actually really excited to start working on it, if only I could start budgeting my time better.

A couple of things I'm going to try and do: find a reference management software that I like, and then leave the references in my dropbox folder so I can access them from all three computers. Write up short reviews here again for papers that I've read, because well, I should be doing that anyway as I finish the papers to avoid re-reading too deeply the ones that are uninteresting/disconnected from what I'm doing. Discuss with Leilah what is appropriate to be spoken of with the internet before publication so that I can figure out just how much to reveal here about what I'm currently working on. Some open source software reviews for various toolkits I've been having to use.

For now, that's catch up time. I'm working on putting together a study group for the Foundations exam amongst my fellow graduate students, so that may be updated here as well.