I must start writing again ...

Well it's been a while, and a lot has happened since I last wrote.

In the last 18 months or so, I've submitted my PhD thesis, worked some more hours in my software engineering job, wrote up a few papers, graduated, moved to Leipzig, Germany and started as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.

Life hasn't exactly settled down, but I am planning on writing about all of the above in the near future ...

Tweeting

So I've been seduced by micro-blogging lately instead of doing much writing over here. It makes me think of the trend away from test match cricket towards the twenty-20 variety ...

Anyway. I have to say that I've been enjoying getting into it. Follow me over at twitter: @jlizier

Writing up

Well, that came around much more quickly than I was expecting. The last three and a half years doing my PhD have been really enjoyable, so on one hand writing up my thesis makes me a little sad to be finishing up. On the other hand, it's quite exciting and I'm looking forward to seeing the bound, finished product.

Anyway, I'm well on the way at the moment, with about 4.5 chapters out of the 6 technical chapters done. And I'm only just hitting the writer's block stage; well that's an overstatement, I'm just having a little trouble getting the right tone on this chapter. Nothing serious. I'm still on track for a pre-Christmas submission. As I said to my supervisors, the only risk is that they won't provide the feedback fast enough :).

I'm looking forward to a nice holiday over Christmas and January, then who knows where I'll end up next year. I put my first post-doc application in last week, I'm working on another one, and planning to put in a local application early next year. Watch this space.

Neural Computation discussion group

Today I'm just going to run a quick advertisement for a new series we're starting in our discussion group on"Neural Computation". It's on Fridays @ 2 pm at CSIRO Marsfield (north-west Sydney), but is open to anyone from outside who is interested.

More details, including the schedule of talks, is available at http://www.prokopenko.net/entropy.html

As it happens, stumbling upon a link for these talks and subsequently coming along to them is how I met Mikhail which led to me starting my PhD. So if you're interested in the area, do come along as you never know where it might lead you!

Funny stunt

Here I was thinking that I was procrastinating about writing up my PhD. Not as much as these guys:
http://dataphiles.blogspot.com/2009/09/machine-learning-protest-at-g20.html
One of the funniest things I've seen for a while ...

Apology to Turing

Not mine, the British government's.

Better late than never.

Information, computation and complex systems workshop

A quick post to advertise the Information, Computation and Complex Systems satellite meeting, which is part of ECCS 09.

From the workshop page:

This workshop will bring together mathematicians and scientists to discuss methods and applications of information theory to complex systems. This includes the perspective of complex systems as computers.
The question of good measures of complexity alone is vital for complex systems research. Many proposals have been made, quite a few based on information theory. The workshop addresses the following topics:

1. Mathematics of information theoretic tools for complex systems
2. Information theory applied to complex systems
3. Complex systems as information processors

The workshop will provide a forum for discussing the various existing information-theoretic and computation-theoretic tools, and their use in complex systems.
The focus will be on the mathematics of information and computation theory applied to complex systems. We encourage both theorists and experimentalists to attend, with either an information theoretic approach or a need for an information theoretic approach.

I think this will be a really interesting workshop, as it directly relates to the focus of my PhD. The invited presentations should be quite good. I'm hoping to get the opportunity to present my own approach of the local information dynamics of distributed computation in complex systems, and hope to meet some people there with the need for this kind of approach.

Submissions are apparently open until Mon 24/8/09, hope to see you there.

Update 1/9/09 - my submission "Coherent local information dynamics in complex computation" was accepted, so I'm now looking forward to presenting at ICCS. The schedule has been posted.