This is a collection of tips compiled for a seminar series at Virginia Tech for Computer Science Grad Students in Fall 2008, compiled by Manas Tungare, with contributions from (in alphabetical order) Manuel Pérez-Quiñones, Rhonda Phillips, Pardha Pyla, Naren Ramakrishnan, Bill Schilit, and Andrea Wiggins.

1. Introduction

This document is extremely terse, so you don’t end up spending too much time reading it.

2. Getting Started

2.1. Classes

In your first few semesters of grad school, you will be required to take classes. They provide an opportunity to learn about new areas, and gain some depth in your area of focus. But grad school is not about getting an A in every class. Don’t ignore research in favor of getting good grades.

Be clear about the requirements of your program: you don’t want to discover that you missed taking a required class and have to take it towards the end of your Ph.D.

Quote from a professor (used with permission):

Students need to know what advisors do when writing a letter of recommendation. I get requests to write letters of recommendation, and all I can say is “s/he was in class frequently”. Students need to know this, not just to avoid that awkward moment of asking for a letter of recommendation that might not be the one they want, but also so this might serve as motivation for them to attend class. They can’t be shy. They need to be known by professors. Ask questions. Go to research group meetings. Read their papers, etc.

2.2. Choosing an Advisor

Find an advisor whose research interests closely match yours. This is obvious. What is not obvious is the next part: find an advisor whose work culture and personality match yours. You will be working with this person for the next several years, and if you do not enjoy a great working relationship with your advisor, things might get rough.

How do you find out about an advisor’s personality? Talk to their current students and ask around. You’ll need to read between the lines of such conversations, keeping in mind that because they work with that advisor, (1) they either genuinely love working with him/her or (2) they will not talk ill of him/her for fear of retribution.

Ask around: some advisors graduate students rapidly, while others are seldom around, so their students take longer to graduate. Some advisors will provide for frequent, short interactions (face-to-face, email, etc.); others will require you to have completed a significant amount of work before they agree to meet you in person. Some encourage independent work that is mentored sporadically; others may engage in more frequent collaborations. Hardly any will provide hand-holding-this is grad school.

Faculty members can be roughly classified in two very broad groups: senior versus junior. Junior faculty looking for tenure must publish prolifically, while senior faculty have more experience in the field-both are good qualities that will ultimately help you. Weigh these factors if you ever need to pick between one from each group.

Before entering into a long-term relationship with someone you’re interested in, a good way to figure out if you’re compatible is to … do an “Independent Study” with them. This is a no-commitment research-oriented one-on-one project. It’s OK to double up class projects or follow them up as independent studies – talk to the faculty member involved.

Understand what professors want/need from you: support for the primary area of research they are interested in, and willingness to take that research forward in meaningful ways. Funding for graduate students comes from research grants, and if you help write one, you may get the money that the grant brings in.

Here’s a quote from a faculty member (used with permission):

For example, I often email students things like “Hey, this conference call seems close to your work. What do you think?” A negative work student (which, I might add, I have learned to spot quickly and don’t often want working with me) will often reply “Interesting, do you really think we should publish there?” That is clearly the wrong answer. If I didn’t think we should publish there, then I wouldn’t have forwarded this to the student.

The other extreme student (which is typical of the students that I work with) replies: “Very interesting. I went to their website and looked at a couple of papers from last year. They definitely seem similar to my work. I have taken the liberty of jotting down some notes about possible papers that we could write. Let’s discuss these next time we meet. Thanks for sending it.”

2.3. Mentoring

Your advisor isn’t your only mentor; find a senior student in your program with similar interests (and, if possible, the same advisor) who is willing to give you some sage senior advice and help you avoid a few common pitfalls. Peer mentoring can be truly invaluable. Astronauts and professional athletes aren’t the only role models; find a high-performing person at the next higher rank from you and emulate their behavior.

Quote from a Ph.D. student:

When I was a Master’s student, I tried to adopt the practices of a successful PhD student, and it really paid off. As a PhD student, I try to meet the expectations for junior faculty so I’ll be better prepared for that role.

While a dissertation is a very individual activity, there are patterns that all grad students go through that are similar (that’s why Ph.D. Comics is funny). Cultivate early, a group of peers, including a few more advanced students, that have experienced the ups/downs of doing a Ph.D. This will help you survive the difficult parts and help you celebrate the high points along the way.

3. Research

3.1. Literature Review Basics

Any research project begins with a review of the existing literature in the field (or at least, that’s how it should be.) Be exhaustive while citing sources; do not open yourself up to claims of plagiarism, even if you are honestly pursuing your own research. Look up citations for stuff that seems like it may have been done before. Ask your peers (lab mates, professional colleagues at other institutions) if they are aware of any papers near your area.

Posting specific questions about related work to your social network is a good way to learn about work that might not have been widely cited. Some colleagues might offer you a sneak peak at unpublished work. Respect the confidentiality that is implicit in the sharing of such work.

3.2. Managing Research

Research requires as much management as pure effort. You must be able to manage your time, your resources, your sources, information you collect, information you come across, information you generate, samples of stuff you record from experiment participants, interview transcripts and recordings, videos, log files from computer software, etc. Make sure you store these items safely.

There is software to conduct every kind of research activity: pick the best tool for the job.

Word-processing programs that were once adequate for undergrad-level reports and essays cease to scale up to the demands of academic publishing. Consider LaTeX for academic writing: it is free software available for all major operating system platforms, and will not cause corrupt documents, a common occurrence with proprietary software that reads/writes undocumented binary file formats. The effort required to gain familiarity with LaTeX pays itself back several times over during an academic career.

BibTeX is a tool and file format for managing bibliographies, along with several applications that help manage BibTeX-formatted bibliographies. Keep a single library of bibliographic material starting from Day One. This will save you several hours when collating annotated literature to cite in a paper or article.

3.3. Communication

Do not underestimate the value of communication in research. Not only will you perform research by yourself, but you also will be required to talk about it with your advisor, discuss it to lab-mates, write about it in papers and articles, and present it at conferences.

Get feedback from your colleagues before communicating with a wider audience – many heads are better than one. You will be surprised at what other people will spot in your work that you had somehow managed to overlook. This applies equally to papers, talks, presentations, defenses and everything in between.

4. Conferences

Starting to write early on makes your writing better over time. Make your presence known in your research area: publish interesting stuff, but not for the sake of publishing something. Some call this the `least-publishable unit’ model of publishing and many disagree with it. Submit meaningful, completed works of research to the appropriate conferences and journals.

Be proactive in submitting to conferences: do not wait for your advisor to come across a CFP (`Call for Papers’). Subscribe to announcement lists in your field where a lot of CFPs get posted. Your advisor can help you locate these.

Attend conferences even if you’re not presenting during that particular year. It is important to stay abreast of research in your area. Often you will have to pay your own way to attend a conference in another country; this money is well-spent.

It is said that during conferences, hallways are where the action is, not the session rooms. That is where the networking happens. Meet people from your field: these are the same people whose work you build upon, who will build upon your work, and contribute to the same scholarly community. In addition, some of these may be interviewing you after you’re done, either as faculty search committee members or as industry researchers.

Attend smaller research meetings too: departmental get-togethers and seminars are not a distraction from your regular work, but a part of it. Don’t be left out!

If you’re in your second year or higher, prepare an elevator pitch. Be ready to talk to complete strangers about what you do. Prepare individual spiels for the following sets of audiences: your grandma/grandpa, your friend from high school who is pursuing a degree in fine arts, your friend from undergrad in Computer Science, your lab-mates, people in your research area, and finally, your advisor. These are sorted by increasing levels of awareness of the field and research experience. This means that you can dig into several levels of detail as the need arises (sometimes also known as the pyramid model of communication.)

4.1. Presenting at Conferences

A conference presentation is not a verbatim recitation of your paper. Often, the time available to presenters during a conference session is barely enough to whet the appetite of your audience and entice them to read the entire paper. Do not try to cram every single finding from your paper into the 20-minute talk.

Practice presentations before a crowd of your peers before you go to that big conference. There is no substitute for rehearsing. Do not ever read from your slides. Do not EVER read from your slides. There are numerous tips for how to be a better presenter and public speaker, far too many to include in this document.

4.2. Student Volunteer Opportunities

Check whether conferences of your interest waive registration fees and/or provide additional perks in exchange for volunteer service during the conference. If you feel you are capable, take up service positions and be of assistance to the community at large. Apply to be a Student Volunteer as soon as (or even before) you submit your paper. Often, deadlines for Student Volunteer applications are earlier than paper submission deadlines (though this varies by conference.) If accepted, the conference organizers will pay a significant part of your travel expenses (registration, hotel, etc.)

`SV’-ing also is a great opportunity to meet your peers. These are other students who will one day be your research colleagues, collaborators on grants, paper reviewers, co-authors and life-long friends. Meet them, keep in touch.

But remember that your academics come first; service should not come at the cost of your research output.

5. Internships

Internships offer students a perspective on where their skills might be useful outside of the academic realm. Even if you do not intend to pursue a career in industry, opting instead for an academic career, an internship provides a unique perspective into your own work and how it fits into the research community at large – something that a summer at school would not be able to provide.

Make sure you plan this with your advisor well in advance. Do not spring a surprise on him/her after you receive an offer and rent an apartment. Some advisors may prefer that you not go on an internship, but continue to work on your research so you may graduate earlier. Others encourage their students to pursue internships, while a few others may actively provide you leads for promising internship positions. Most research internships are gained either through your own research reputation, or through your advisor’s professional contacts. Thus, a conversation with your advisor on this topic should be held earlier rather than later.

Researchers from industry often scrutinize their intern candidates at conference presentations and other socio-professional venues. You might even receive a spot offer over a casual conversation with your would-be mentor if they are impressed with your work.

While the internship application process is not as rigorous as that for a full-time position, there are few positions and they’re filled as soon as a candidate with matching skills is found. Apply early. Quote from a Ph.D. student:

Don’t be afraid to pursue opportunities. I was always intimidated when I saw solicitations for fellowship applications, travel funding, student grants, awards, etc, but I learned that it doesn’t hurt to apply, and sometimes you’re more qualified than you think you are.

Some research institutions offer internships that do not involve rigorous research, but instead utilize your prototype-building skills to push their research agenda. If you’re in your early years of the graduate program, these are fine ways to get you the proverbial foot in the door and a deeper insight into that institution’s research program.

While at an internship, do not completely ignore the research you conducted back at school. Advisors will understand that your current time demands must favor your current employer, but a three month hiatus in school research can lead to problems resuming it once you’re back.

6. Networking

Know your community and try and get them to know you.

Solving an important research problem sitting in one’s windowless cubicle is good, but networking with peers at research conferences and other academic venues increases one’s chances of getting a real job.

Most academic networking happens at conferences. Make sure you carry business cards so you can exchange contact info easily if required. Though, quite often, you will end up exchanging cards with your peers – who also just got their cards printed! – you never know when you might meet someone who really would like to get in touch with you. Since most academic positions are filled via word-of-mouth, it’s always good to be easy to contact.

You may be invited to spontaneous group lunches or dinners with newly-made acquaintances, which often lead to excellent conversations to remember for a long time. After all, these are people from your own research field who have all congregated to exchange ideas with one another. (But of course, don’t be pushy or show up uninvited.)

If your advisor, committee members, or senior students are attending, they may introduce you to their acquaintances from other schools/companies.

Many advise removing your social networking profiles, such as Facebook or Twitter profiles. While this advice has some merit if your profile has objectionable content, that is likely not the most common case for this audience. As information grows, one’s social network is a valuable resource to be tapped into for relevant, up-to-date news from your field. Often, such nuggets might be found in your friends’ status updates. After several conferences I’ve been to, attendees have taken the initiative to start online groups to continue the conversation beyond the conference. It is a good idea to participate in these.

There also are networking conferences designed for specific audiences; if you are a woman, consider attending the Grace Hopper Conference. If you belong to a minority group in computer science, consider attending the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing. There are likely be others in your own field as well.

7. Preparing for the Real World

7.1. Tenure Track (Academic Positions)

For an academic position, you will be evaluated on your ability to chart your own research agenda, and pursue it to fruition. This includes coming up with hypotheses, conducting experiments and publishing your results. As the first two steps are opaque to an external observer, you are thus judged primarily based on your publication output. Whether you like it or not, it’s a publish-or-perish world.

Always keep an updated copy of your résumé and CV available online. A CV (curriculum vitae) is a complete record of your relevant accomplishments and forms part of your application dossier for academic positions.

If your university supports student involvement in school governance, become involved in governance committees. This may seem like a distraction from your studies, but it is excellent preparation for a faculty position in which you will be expected to contribute in service roles in addition to research and teaching.

Do as a student what faculty do: writing research grant proposals. You may start off by assisting your advisor in writing sections of their grant proposals that are related to your research. It is often possible to turn your dissertation proposal into a grant proposal. Even though students cannot be officially co-PIs (Principal Investigator) of a grant, the experience you will gain even from being a nameless contributor is priceless.

7.2. Industry Track (Research Laboratory Positions)

Industry values slightly different skills in budding researchers than does academia. Industry often runs on much faster timelines than academic research, especially in terms of bringing products from the laboratory to the mainstream. Thus, in addition to fundamental research, an industry researcher plays an important secondary role in “productizing” research ideas. This involves developing prototypes and working with development teams to implement these on a larger scale.

It is a belief among some graduate students that a career in industry limits one’s freedom in what you may work on. While it is true that an individual researcher’s broad research direction may need to align with the company’s strategic vision, there is often wide scope for researchers to define the specific problems they are interested in working on and pursue those with their team. It is often the case in academic (though lamentable) that choice of research direction is dictated by available funding opportunities.

8. Closing Statements

Take care of yourself first. Paper submissions, assignments and pending work can take their toll on your health if you ignore yourself. Make sure you eat well, on time, and maintain the energy that is the foundation of everything else.

Enjoy your time here. You’re doing this because you love it!

9. Resources

• Strunk and White’s Elements of Style: ISBN 9780205309023.
• How to have a bad career in academia – David Patterson [PDF]
• Graduate Student Resources Page – Dan Horn
• Tips for Grad Students – Yuhong Yuan
• So Long and Thanks for the Ph.D. – Ronald T. Azuma
• How to be a Good Graduate Student – Marie desJardins
• Grad Student Humor – Dan Horn
• How to write a dissertation – Douglas E. Comer
• Ph.D. Comics – Jorge Cham (and his spies who seem to have a window into every grad student’s cubicle)
• Presentation Zen – Garr Reynolds

10 years ago, on this day, I received the first payment for a tiny shareware program I wrote. It was a one-trick-pony, a birthday reminder program.

Folks around me will tell you I’m bad at remembering things, and always choose to write everything down. So I wrote a program to keep track of friends and birthdays, and popup a reminder on the right day, perhaps a few days earlier if I needed to buy a gift first. As a teen writing and distributing my first-ever commercial piece of software, I had named it eponymously as ManasTech Birthdays. I wrote it, released it, and sold a few copies (nothing astronomical, but yeah, it was fun to see the checks coming in.)

As I look back nostalgically, several thoughts cross my mind today. The more things have changed, the more they have remained the same. I loved writing software then, I love writing software now. I used to sneak out of classes and stay up late nights to code up the latest idea that crossed my mind. Today, I procrastinate on my research and take time off to write little scripts and tiny widgets, that — before you know it — have hundreds of users and need regular maintenance.

Then, the norm was to release products as shareware, without the hassles of finding a publisher or having to stock shelves with packaging. All you needed was an Internet connection and a program that solved a need. Today, the norm is to free your software, and release it into the wild. The Free Software Movement has been gaining ground ever since.

The most interesting aspect is perhaps the domain in which I’ve been working. The Birthday Manager helped store your personal information — contacts and calendar events. Today, I’m involved in Personal Information Management research, which is pretty much the same topic. I even wrote a paper detailing how people manage their calendars. Little had I known 10 years ago that I would be fascinated enough with personal information to pursue a career in it.

Sometimes I wonder what the next 10 years will be like.

Update: P.S. For those curious about how I got hold of the check image for this blog post: yes, I’m a digital packrat and have a copy of all my files dating back to 1997 on my current laptop.

When most professors have closed-door policies and need weeks of lead time before being able to schedule a meeting, here’s why I love working here!

Let’s see:

1. Cyclone in Irrawaddy Delta, Myanmar
   
   
2. Volcano in Chaiten, Chile
   
   
3. Earthquake in Sichuan, China
   
   
4. Tornadoes in Central United States
   
   
5. Wildfires in Central Florida, United States
   
   

May the souls of all the victims of all these disasters rest in peace. May the survivors find the courage to get back to their lives, even as they grieve their loved ones.

And yes, we can help them in their efforts.

Now there’s a business opportunity that today’s airline industry and airports have created: why not sell pre-packaged suitcases at airports to scalp travel-weary passengers whose luggage has landed in Murmansk?

Here’s how it would work: I’d walk up to the Lost and Found desk of the airline, usually fortified behind several layers of arrows pointing upward, downward, or in all other sorts of directions in which I cannot walk; barriers laid down with those flexible tapes that you can simply unhook and pass through; or behind a scruffy-looking bouncer. They would then cheerfully inform me that my luggage has, indeed, failed to follow me around in my travails around the world, and make me fill out a 3-page form describing my “small black bag” in as many words. After a state of shock, worry, desperation, and finally, anger, I would quit discussing this with the airline folks and move on, resigned to my fate.

That’s when I would notice the conveniently located “Missing Luggage Mart”. I’d turn to the enterprising store-owner and tell him/her my size, and the duration of my trip. He/she would whip out a readymade suitcase of shirts, t-shirts, trousers, undergarments, socks, shorts, a belt, a cellphone charger, a toothbrush, a toothpaste, a tiny bottle of shaving cream, a tiny bottle of shampoo, etc., and I would be on my own merry way.

And a towel, of course. Nobody should ever be without their towel.

Google recruiters use Google to search for recruits for Google. And how do I know? I found out because of another Google product. The irony is that I’ve been at Google, and I will be at Google, so I’m not exactly who they’re looking for. So, all this, and the search was a failure, then?

Here’s what happened: I’m in the habit of checking my web server logs every once in a while to see which pages are popular, where my users are coming from, what keywords they type into search engines to find me, and sometimes just to stalk my stalkers. For this, I use two great tools, StatCounter and Google Analytics. (StatCounter is the better of the two, by the way, but they have a last-500-visitor limit, so I need to check my stats at least daily.)

Today, the following entries appeared in my logs:
(inurl:resume or intitle:resume or inurl:cv or intitle:cv) (c or c++ or java) “computer science” “software engineer” (415 or 650 or 925 or 510 or 408 or 369 or 669 or 707 or 831 or 916 or 530) -jobs -job

The IP addresses show that the request came from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The query shows exactly who they’re looking for. Interestingly, they seem to be hiring locally (the numbers in parentheses are all telephone area prefixes in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

There’s so much Google involved in this story, it’s scary.

A German, a Brazilian and an Indian, all three student volunteers, walked towards the conference office the day before a conference. As it happened, the student volunteer chair had had some trouble reaching the venue, and there were no specific instructions for the volunteers at that time. Nobody else had any information or any plan to hand out either. (Turns out they did, but our protagonists did not know at the time.)

The German noted this and wondered how they could be so ill-prepared and without a plan just one day before the conference. The Indian remarked that they might just be running late and here’s hoping that everything would be fine and dandy by the next day, the day of the conference. The Brazilian said, oh well, if they don’t have anything for us to do, we’ll just go to the beach and have fun instead.

While this anecdote might not have had the punchline you might have been waiting for, (especially given the clichéd setup), it’s a nice illustration of how cultural upbringing shapes our thinking in the most trivial of incidences in life.

I received the following email a few minutes ago, with fake headers and the works, and is formatted exactly the same way as the regular email we get from these folks. It’s probably viral marketing for the upcoming game, Portal, releasing November 23, 2007. Lots of references to it in the text.

1. UNDERGROUND HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE
2. BOBBY FISCHER – ENDED THE SOVIET CHESS HEGEMONY
3. SELECTING YOUR CABLE COMPANY IN BLACKSBURG
4. PI EATING CONTEST
5. POSSIBLE BAG BAN
6. DONALDSON-BROWN LOCKS TO BE CHANGED
7. ODD – OPEN DOOR DAY
8. MICROSOFT VISTA SERVICE PACK DEMO
9. WEEKLY SPEAKER SERIES
10. REGISTRATION FOR DEAN’S FORUM ON HEALTH, FOOD AND NUTRITION
11. STUDY PARTICIPANTS NEEDED

1. UNDERGROUND HALLOWEEN ADVENTURE
A Halloween tour of the steam tunnels beneath campus will be offered for the first time this year to four groups of eight people on Oct. 29th and 30th. Sign-up for each of the four tours will begin on Monday, October 22nd, and continue until all places are taken. Interested parties should contact Richard McCoy at 231-3200 for more information.

2. BOBBY FISCHER – ENDED THE SOVIET CHESS HEGEMONY
Monday, Oct 22, 5:30-7:00 in Williamsburg Rm, 7:00-8:00 in Haymarket Theater in Squires Center The man who ended the Soviet chess hegemony by defeating Boris Spassky will speak at Virginia Tech. A reception will precede his presentation at 7:00pm. Robert James “Bobby” Fischer is a United States-born chess Grandmaster who in 1972 became the only US-born chess player to become the official World Chess Champion. Fischer’s victory during the Cold War caused a great interest in chess and is responsible for the swelling of members of the World Chess Federation.

3. SELECTING YOUR CABLE COMPANY IN BLACKSBURG
Sometime between Tuesday, Oct 23 08:00am and next Friday, Nov 2 7:00pm in Room C in the GLC Are you interested in purchasing a subscription package from your local cable company? Presenters from NTC Communications Comcast Digital Cable and Cox Communications will talk about the different internet, phone and cable packages available and answer questions about rates and programming.

4. PI EATING CONTEST
Tuesday, Oct 23, 7:00pm in Room F in the GLC the VT Math club is sponsoring a Pi festival. Approximately 3,141 pies will be available for sampling. They will include but are not limited to Apple, Banoffee, Banana cream, Blackberry, Blueberry, Cheesecake, Cherry, Chestnut, Cream, Custard, Grape, Lemon meringue, Peach, Pecan, Pumpkin, and Rhubarb. In addition, at 7:30 there will also be a pie eating contest. The first contestant to eat an irrational number of pies will receive a hand-carved Penrose triangle.

5. POSSIBLE BAG BAN
Due to the heightened security of many university campuses, a possible ban of all bags on campus may be implemented in the next two weeks. Backpacks, duffels, shoulder-bags, and purses may soon join the list of items prohibited on campus. This measure has been proposed since it has been pointed out that bags may be able to conceal already illegal items. An unlikely supporter of the ban is the campus Health and Safety Department as it would also alleviate the troubling phenomenon of overweight book bags that commonly lead to health problems later in life. Acceptance of the proposal will be decided by the campus Board of Directors later this week.

6. DONALDSON-BROWN LOCKS TO BE CHANGED
It has come to the attention of university security personnel that many graduate students have access to the GLC 24 hours a day. In order to remedy this threat to campus security, all doors to the GLC will have their locks changed between Monday evening and Tuesday morning. In addition, Donaldson Brown dorm rooms will also have their locks changed on a short rotation. You may need to request a new room key from your Residential Fellow.

7. ODD – OPEN DOOR DAY
To help promote social interaction amongst the graduate students, Thurs, Oct 25, will be open door day. Graduate students on campus are encouraged to keep their door open and meet their neighbors as well as their Residential Fellow if they have not done so already. We are aware that the doors in the GLC rooms close on their own, this is why you have been provided with doorstops. Use them! Hopefully open door day will become more routine and no longer considered odd.

8. MICROSOFT VISTA SERVICE PACK DEMO
Wednesday, Oct 24, 6:00-7:00pm in McBryde 666, Microsoft will be giving an exclusive preview of service pack one for Vista. In response to the massive number of problems, compatibility, and stability issues in Vista, Microsoft has spent the past year fervently addressing these issues in the much anticipated service pack 1 (SP1). Representives from Microsoft will demonstrate the features and stability changes of SP1, such as the newly bolstered DRM software. This update and others in SP1 that will be demonstrated should help provide Vista users with new enhanced reduced functionality.

9. WEEKLY SPEAKER SERIES
Friday, Oct 26, 4:00-5:00pm in Room F in the GLC Faculty speaker: Dr. Henry Warren – Physics, on Structure of the Proton. Graduate students and faculty from across the university present weekly their teaching and research passions in a casual, coffee house atmosphere. Free coffee and pastries served from 3:45pm.

10. REGISTRATION FOR DEAN’S FORUM ON HEALTH, FOOD AND NUTRITION
Registration for the Nov 5 forum is now open. This forum will showcase health, food, and nutrition efforts in research, extension/outreach, and teaching currently underway at McDonalds, Kraft Foods, Monsanto, and LuthorCorp. Register by Sunday, Oct 28 if you plan on attending the event. Sponsors will showcase the health benefits of the latest developments in GMOs, growth hormones, preservatives, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated oils, flavoring and texturizing food additives. For more information, including registration links, and to view the Forum agenda, please visit http://www.mcvideogame.com/index-eng.html

11. STUDY PARTICIPANTS NEEDED
A graduate student researcher working on behalf of Aperture Science is seeking highly-motivated individuals in good physical condition between the ages of 18-25 for her study. Participants will be asked to perform complex tasks. The entire study should last a minimum of 3 hours and moist, delicious cake will be served upon successful completion of the test. For further information or to sign up to participate, please contact Glados, glados@aperturescience.com

I often find myself talking to people who I should know (in theory), but for some reason, in practice, my neurons refuse to make the right connections to remember these connections. Wouldn’t it be great if someone designed a heads-up display based on your social network?

This is how it would work: when I activate it, and it notices I’m talking to someone, it would do a quick scan and tell me his/her name. That would be a life-saver, and would avoid the first five minutes of the 20-Questions game I have to play every time this happens (while making sure that the other guy (or girl!) doesn’t notice I’m playing the game in my mind.)

It could also tell me how I know that person, because sometimes I remember the name, but nothing else. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know that I’m talking to John Doe, who went to the same high school as I did, and who is now President and CEO of a Fortune 100 company (note to self: graduate soon.)

Not just names, it could even tell me more about the person I didn’t already know (or, in the more likely case, I’ve forgotten.) I’d love to know that my friend John Doe is no longer with his (now ex-) girlfriend Jane, so that would cut out a lot of awkward conversation. Knowing that he just went on a cruise to Alaska would instantly give us a topic to chat about. Knowing that the lady on his arm is not his wife would probably also help. I could ask him about our common friends and if he were in touch with any of them. And then he could use his heads-up display to pull their details up and tell me what I’d already looked up, but that’s another story.

So why isn’t something like this on the market yet? I’m sure there would be throngs of people lined up outside the offices of the company that makes the first such thing. And if they try to patent it, you can cite my blog post as prior art. You’re welcome.

Update: A picture is worth a thousand words. A movie, perhaps a million?

Everyone agrees meetings aren’t fun, but what if you’re discussing matters with your teammates while pedaling a 7-person bike furiously on the streets of Mountain View? Forget the discussing matters part, but the rest of it sure is a lot of fun.

Just don’t call it the party bike; it’s the “conference” bike. Google’s newest acquired toy is a 7-person bike, much like New York City’s Party Bike [link broken at the time of posting]. It can be scheduled as a conference room for holding meetings and as a team-building exercise (no pun intended).

Our team rode the bike to the nearby Shoreline Lake on a hot Friday afternoon. Just for kicks, we rode it up a hillock and let it go full speed downhill. Here’re some action shots!

This is a gem from a long time ago, when I used to be a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at Virginia Tech. In all three semesters, I have received mostly positive reviews from my students, and I’m told that the scores I got were pretty high to be awarded by an undergraduate class to a GTA. Well, anyway, there’s always the occasional negative review. Here’s one. Any other comment I make on it will ruin it for you, so I’ll just shut up.

I have posted photos from today’s candlelight vigil at Virginia Tech. Reporters, journalists and media-persons, please note: the license explicitly prohibits any commercial use of these photos. Others, please feel free to share/email/print these photos for friends, family, and everyone else who might have been impacted by this tragedy.

It’s an ironic and sad commentary on my to-do list when the top item, “Read the ‘Getting Things Done‘ book” has stayed on it for far too long.

Time Magazine captured the essence of 2006 (and maybe 2005 and 2004 too) when they nominated You as Person of the Year. Yes, you, who contributed to a global knowledge-base that’s larger than anything the experts could ever do. You, who brought attention to shameful acts that otherwise would have remained hidden from the public eye. You, who created an operating system that has the major for-profit vendor all worried. You, who brought us Web 2.0.

Here’s to You!

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day. While we spend a moment of silence in memory of those who succumbed, this is also a time we can do something proactively. The (RED) effort encourages consumers to buy (RED) products over competing others, and according to their manifesto, a percentage of the proceeds will be used to buy medicine for victims of AIDS. A long list of (RED) products includes manufacturers such as Apple, Motorola, American Express, Gap, and Armani, and the effort has been endorsed by Google.

My site is wearing a red ribbon today, in the form of a red band at the top of each page. May we collectively be able to make a difference.

Yeah, right. And kids do.

When one says, “guns don’t kill people”, it’s worth examining whether the same killing would have taken place in the absense of a gun. In gang wars, the answer would be yes, of course. But in many of the recent killings by school children, or — the horror — toddlers, it’s hard to argue that the answer could even remotely be ‘yes’.

Today’s killing of a 5-year old girl by her 3-year old brother might never have happened if the gun used for the killing were not available to the brother. Morgan King was even younger than Kayla Rolland at the time of her very untimely death (Kayla was thus far the youngest victim of firearm-related deaths.)

With elections around the corner, and everyone debating apparently more important issues, I hope you aren’t forgotten, Morgan.

R.I.P.

The headline of this post isn’t newsworthy at all. And the rest of the post is probably not newsworthy to a lot of people who read this blog. But I fixed a computer.

So, to fix it, my laptop connected to my cellphone via Bluetooth, which connected to a celltower via GPRS, which sent my SSH packets over TCP/IP to another university machine inside the firewall, from which I then SSHd to the sick machine, and fixed it. The irony is that the problem was with the machine’s network interface! The latency was nothing to be proud of, but was pretty usable.

This is probably the setup with the maximum number of different devices and protocols that I’ve ever used, hence it warranted a blog post.

No, this isn’t a warning from Winston Churchill from the World War II times, this is when Google schedules aircraft fly-bys over the Mountain View Headquarters for Geo Developers Day. Google had invited geo-developers to get together and discuss cool things that they were doing with Google Earth & Google Maps. (Oh, BTW, check out the new Google Earth for Mac and Linux!) As part of this event, the plan was to have an aircraft take aerial photos of the campus to appear on Google Earth and Google Maps shortly.

A bunch of us interns, as well as some of the guests, joined in to get ourselves more than a pixel on the map. We all lay down on the patio in an effort to capture more “screen real estate”. The aircraft made a few zigzag scans, so I’m holding my breath to see what they captured.

Meanwhile, here’s what I captured. Much less impressive than a bird’s eye view, but interesting nevertheless.

I made a video slideshow of the photos I took at the Jardin Botanique in Montréal, Canada, during my trip in April. I’d been there to attend CHI 2006 and stayed a day longer to see the beautiful city. I managed to catch a limited-time exhibition at the Botanical Garden, titled “Les Papillons en Liberté” (Butterflies Go Free.) After the trip, my laptop was 2 gigs heavier, filled with marvellous photos of the city. I’ve been lazy enough not to have posted them to my site as yet, they’re just so beautiful, my heart hurts to crop them down to web-friendly sizes. Ditto with the video …

Because I have tremendous respect for a phone that can continue to work after all I’ve done to it.

Exhibit A: my previous cellphone in its current state is held together by its own wires, and yet is able to perform all its vital bodily functions. But I feel it’s now time to retire the old-timer and get me a new Samsung T809.