kuniga.me > NP-Incompleteness > 2011 in Review

2011 in Review

01 Jan 2012

This is a meta-post to review what happened in 2011.

First Semester

The first semester was very exhausting, but also productive.

Papers. Writing papers is one of the things that motivates me the most in academia. Since the end of 2010 we were writing a paper that ended up being accepted at the CGA (Computational Geometry Applications) conference.

Earlier this year, our extended abstract was accepted at the CTW (Cologne-Twente Workshop). When I started writing my dissertation, we saw the possibility of writing yet another article, which was accepted by Sibigrapi.

Sibgrapi. I went to present our accepted paper at Sibgrapi in Maceió. It was my first congress and the first time I presented in English and to a large audience. I wrote a post about the event.

Master’s Defense. After approximately 2 years of hard work, I concluded my master’s project with the defense of my thesis.

Google Summer of Code. During the first semester, I was accepted to Google Summer of Code to work on a Computer Graphics project (integrate a shader). I had to juggle this project with writing my dissertation and writing the paper for Sibgrapi!

Fortunately, in the end everything worked out. I wrote several posts about this project.

Google Code Jam. I didn’t qualify for the regionals, but I ended up in the top 1000 and winning a shirt :)

New job! Thanks to Carlos’ referral, I’m now working at an optimization company, CFlex. So far I’m learning a lot about Java software development, as well as reading paper and implementing solutions to scheduling problems.

Second Semester

For the remainder of the second semester, things were much calmer.

Codefest. I participated in a competition where we were supposed to tackle an optimization problem, having two weeks to implement a solution. In the end we didn’t take the prize due to a silly bug, as I described here.

Haskell. I decided to start learning Haskell in order to improve my programming skills. I’ve been surprised by the elegance of some code snippets and the syntax of the language.

Blog

The blog is about to complete 3 years. I have managed to keep my resolution to post once a week.

The blog had an average of 42 visits per day, with a total of 16k since its inception. The day with the most visits was November 30th with 104 visitors.

Resolutions for 2012

For 2012, I’ve already enrolled in two Stanford online courses: Probabilist Graphical Models and Natural Language Processing.

I would like to learn more about data mining aimed at supporting decision making and also about stochastic optimization/programming, which considers factors of uncertainty, very present in the problems we tackle in the industry.

Given that, I think the probabilistic graphical modeling course will help bolster my probability base knowledge (which is pretty weak). The natural language processing course I took more out of curiosity and I still haven’t decided if I’m actually going to do it.

Notes

This is a review and translation done in 2021 of my original post in Portuguese: Retrospectiva 2011.