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Spent the morning giving a talk to my daughter's school class on "What does daddy do for work?". Actually it was more about programming and what skills are important for programming. I didn't really have any nice work swag (I think the only thing w
Maya and Lucy started school today. Our neighborhood elementary school, Foothills Elementary, is on a year-round schedule, so that is why they're starting so early compared to traditional schools. Maya started fifth grade and Lucy started second grade. Eli will be starting kindergarten, but he'll be on a traditional schedule as he is attending an all-day kindergarten program provided by our day care provider.
Christine went with the girls to school this morning and took a camera, but it had dead batteries, so I went this afternoon and got some pictures after school. You can see those at <http://picasaweb.google.com/fozzmoo/MayaAndLucyStartSchool2008/> or enjoy the embedded slideshow below.
So, I know some of you out there have been just dying to know what it is I am actually doing here in grad school. What does "research" even mean in Computer Science?
Well, research is (informally) that activity which isn't classwork. Or maybe, that activity which leads to papers and dissertations. It isn't reading stuff in the library or even on the internet (though those activities are part of research). It is primarily thinking. We do form hypotheses and test them. Our hypotheses are that this algorithm we dreamed up will do what we think it will, and the test is writing a program to do it. Perhaps that is the biggest difference between research in CS and say web programming. In web programming and many other standard programming tasks, you have a task and you write a program to perform that task. You know it can be done, it just needs to be done. There's lots of fun to be had along the way in how it is done, the software engineering, but there's no mystery to the actual task.
Now, "devise algorithm and test it" isn't the only flavor of CS research. There's also the theoretical guys who never write a line of code. They're essentially mathemeticians in disguise. There's the usability folks who design interfaces and do user tests. They're half-psychologist mutants in disguise. There are many different flavors of research that fall under the CS umbrella. I have just described the one that happens to be what I'm doing.
So enough babble. You want to know what I'm doing. I want to tell you. So I made a little web page to do just that. There you can download my prospectus which is the document that tells my committee what I plan to do. The steering project proposal/contract, if you will.
And from here on out you can call me the Registration Detective, or just Detective for short. But please don't call me Reggie.
A couple weeks back I finished my PhD comprehensive examination, which means I am officially a "PhD Candidate".
The comprehensive exam is a literature survey paper in my area of research and an oral presentation of that survey. You're welcome to read/peruse both at http://hans.fugal.net/comps.
After posting a few tips on completing a Masters Degree and a Thesis, I had a thought that it would be fun to post about the same topic from a lighter angle. How many emails does it take to complete a Masters Degree? I started using Gmail in 2005. Unfortunately, I don't have [...]
After defending my thesis in December, I completed the rest of my graduation papars and will receive my Masters Degree in Computer Science. I don’t have to expound any further to express how excited I am to be finished with the whole process. Most Masters programs take around 30 credit hours of graduate course work [...]
I’ve been maintaining a google calendar of the BYU academic schedule for the past year or so. It just occurred to me to let people know about it, though it has been “public” the whole time.
There’s the official gcal button, and here’s the ical and the html. Before this one I was using someone elses. Worked great until he graduated and stopped maintaining it. So if anyone would like “write access” to this calendar as well, just drop me a line. Hopefully we can keep it alive for generations to come.
Actually, I hope BYU will publish an ical version or something else parseable by gcal itself someday. Just keep hoping.
0 commentsI’ve been finishing up the final formatting for my thesis this last week at Utah State University. Latex is great when you are provided a style file beforehand. If you have to modify or create your own style however, beware. That is a more time consuming process. I haven’t yet switched [...]
I just found out that UEN (Utah Education Network) was doing an update or some maintenance. The end result was the lose of all my work. :/ For one reason or another they had to roll back to last Tuesday’s data. This just isn’t a good thing for the end of the semester. This means that I can’t download a test that I have to do by Monday and I’ve lost the last 6 chapter quizzes and tests that I took this week. :/
Now this might not seem that bad, although how’s going to cover me for my lost time, but there are a lot of schools on the system and it nearing the end of the semester. It affects 15 different groups of which just about all, but maybe 1 or 2 are colleges. So no thanks to blackboard vista and Oracle.
And if anyone want to read the explanation, read on.
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