In about an hour and a half, I will be boarding a train to Edinburgh to attend a study group with industry at Heriot-Watt University. There are direct trains from Oxford to Edinburgh, and my choice of the 1:36 train is so that I can have a route with 0 layovers. Then I can just chill in the train for a while and not have to pay attention at all if I don't want to.
This trip will include several firsts for me:
(1) It will be my first time in Edinburgh, which is where solitons were first observed. It's supposed to be a really nice city, and I bought new film and a new battery for my camera in preparation for it. (Note that I will finally get off my ass and buy a digital camera, which I've been intending to do for several years. I can be really lazy about things sometimes... I'm waiting until I'm in the States in May because it will cost me half as much if I buy it while I'm back home.)
(2) This will be my first time in Scotland. I am gradually visiting new countries. I'll also knock off Italy later this summer.
(3) This will be my first study group. On the first day, six industry groups will present their problems, and the attendees will spend the rest of the week seeing how far they can get on them. It should be very cool. I never got a chance to participate in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling, and this has that kind of flavor. Besides working on interesting problems, this has the chance to lead to data sets and longer-term projects and collaborations. It's an excellent opportunity and it gives me the chance to spend a few days away from home during the break (which in general is quite revitalizing). The problem that interests me the most based on the online descriptions is one involving recommendations for items with few reviews---essentially, it's difficult to deal with those kinds of tails because of small sample sizes, so the plan is to try to come up with clever ways of dealing with that. From my perspective, this is a networks problem and, in fact, I believe several of these issues have been studied in past papers that use, for example, data sets from Amazon's recommendation system. Plus I can see how the various Netflix prize solutions have dealt with similar issues.
1 day ago
2 comments:
Edinburgh's a neat city; I spent a weekend there when I was studying at Cambridge. If you've got time to do touristy stuff, definitely check out Edinburgh Castle.
I've heard lots of great things about the city, though unfortunately I don't think I'll have much (any?) time to be a tourist. Though maybe I'll escape from the study group for one day to do that? :)
For now, I can't get mlb.tv to work in my room for some reason. I don't know if MLB.com is messed up at the moment (in past seasons, they've changed stuff without warning and I needed to play around to get it to work again) or if for some reason the connection I'm using disallows this for some reason.
I'm not in the mood to play around too much with this right now, and now I'm missing the Dodger game (and Vin Scully is probably announcing too!). Sigh.
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