What happens in Montreal stays in Montreal

Tomorrow morning I am heading on a bus to the airport for my flight to the land of maple leaves, Celine Dion, and Tim Horton's. (Tim Horton's is apparently a big deal to many Canadians, but I must admit that I don't really get it. I've been to one and it was quite generic. Maybe some of the local Canadian folks want to educate me on this one?) In particular, I'm going to Montreal, which has various levels of association with all three (especially Celine Dion). Another big Montreal thing is smoked meat, which one can find ubiquitously in many restaurant menus there.

The reason for my travel is a fully-funded invite---that originally went to a more senior Oxonian, but he was busy and asked if I'd go---to a study group with industry. I went to one of these in Edinborough in April and it was fun but very exhausting. (I didn't end up walking around through Edinborough and seeing it properly, which is quite a shame given how cool a city it seems to be---and is, according to those who have truly experienced it. Hence, I will need to go back there and have a proper look around instead of just wandering the infinite corridors of Herior-Watt University.) At the Edinborough study group, I worked on a problem on item recommendation systems, which the industry presenters formulated as a probability problem but which our group recast as a bipartite network problem. (Funny, one wouldn't expect me to do that. :) ) The list of problems in Montreal includes one that is very TSP-like, and that's the one that seems the most interesting to me based on the short descriptions that have been published online. (The way it works is that on the first day, the industry folks present the problems---which are typically ambiguous and otherwise ill-formed---and the academics spend the rest of the week trying to get as far as they can with them, which for many problems can amount to just figuring out what the problem actually is.)

Anyway, I am very excited to have the chance to go to Montreal again. It's on the short short list of my favorite cities in the entire world (and, in this case, I am able to make that claim without any emotional bias due to the people or institutions in that city---well, except possibly for Youppi!), and I should have at least some time to go around and do cool things. (One big difference from Edinborough was that Heriot-Watt was away from the city center and in this case I should be able to just walk to where things are happening. If nothing else, the metro system in Montreal is really good, so I can haul ass over to St. Catherine's Street easily enough. There's an RPG store there that I might visit and I also want to pick up N+. Nope, I'm not going to be able to pick up N+ because it's been delayed another two weeks, so it's now slated to come out the day after I return to the UK. Bloody Hell. I was going to pick it up in Pasadena in January. I'll also be partaking in Montreal's many excellent cafes and restaurants. So I'm looking forward to going!) The last time I was there (March 2004), I tested Newton's laws of by running into a glass wall (they work) and had a butterfly give birth on my jacket while I was wearing it. (I have a picture to prove this. I think several of you have seen it before. There was also a Housequote related to this incident, but it was Jing Xu rather than me who uttered it.) The one time before that was in June 2003, and I can confirm that the weather in Montreal is much nicer during the summer than it is in March. :)

Oh, and in preparation for my upcoming exhausting study group with industry, I spent most of today (about 12 hours) revising a 40+ journal-page manuscript from top to bottom. I can overstate how painful this was! Now my collaborator has it and the hope is to submit it after his next pass. (It's conceivable that he'll ask me to go over specific parts again, but I hope he'll agree that we can submit it and post it on the arxiv. We'll then make more changes later when we deal with the referee reports and have had time to recover from the present ordeal.) One of my network science colleagues (and a fellow community-detector, no less) for whom I have a great deal of respect really liked it, which makes me feel very good about the paper.