Planning Research Future

I am finally back from the US.
We spent the last couple of days focusing on planning, scoping and scheduling the research plans for the next couple of months. The complete plan includes work for the research group up to the year 2012. These are all tasks which we have and want to address in the future.

We will present our plans next week and try to get the buy in from our professor and faculty. After that, we can focus on budget and middle-term planning. The short-term planning (that is until April 2010) is almost finished. This includes

• 2 master's thesis
• 1 possible master's thesis
• my dissertation proposal
• and finally: my dissertation

All our work will be published, structured and planned using Trac. You might want to take a look at it here.

Attending the ICSC2009 in Berkely, USA

At this very moment, I am about to hear the opening keynote for the 2nd day of the ICSC2009 in Berkeley.
I got here on Sunday night after my 3 weeks vacation touring all over the western US (that includes Napa, Yosemite, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Phoenix) and visiting my family in San Diego.
I was fortunate enough to have my presentation at 10am the first day of the conference on Monday. It went wall and considering the fact that Dr. Fillmore and Dr. Scott attended my talk made it even more interesting. Some of the people who were in the audience let my know during the reception dinner that they really enjoyed my talk and that they were able to tell I was confident speaking in front of crowds. Well, that's when all the music studies and concerts I gave pay off ;-)

Today, I will listen to another parallel session about NLP - there were some interesting aspects so far which I might be able to consider for my work. I will have to thoroughly read the papers though.

That's it for now, I will keep you posted.