Nick Hopper (UMM ’99, now a tenure-line CSci faculty at the Twin Cities campus) invited us out to the Twin Cities’ Computer Science and Engineering biennial technology forum/open house, which was very cool. At various times it looked like as many as 10 or more UMMers might make the trip, but in the end mid-terms and on-campus events trimmed things down to Emily, Elena, and myself.
The scramble to get ready was pretty crazy, but all worth it as it was an excellent event and I got to meet some interesting new people and hook up with folks I hadn’t seen in a while. A major highlight was the informal UMM CSci reunion dinner last night after the open house was all over. We had 20 UMM folks in all, plus two wee’uns, for a fun and tasty evening.
For a whole host of reasons (some more sensible than others) I haven’t interacted much with the Twin Cities’ CSci universe much in my 14+ years in the U of M system. It was clear that this really needed to change, though, as we currently have one alum (Nick) on their faculty and several more as students in their grad program. Thus Nick’s invite was a perfect opportunity to do some fixing on that.
Elena, Emily, and I enjoyed a nice drive out Thursday evening, with much discussion of Emily’s future and what she could do with her degrees in French and CSci. She’d never really heard much about computational linguistics and natural language processing and was sufficiently excited by that possibility that she used much of our day there to learn more. She wasn’t able to hook up with any of the faculty working in that area on such short notice, but the grad students were really welcoming and she ended up spending up several hours in their lab learning more about their work and the field in general. Very cool, and big thanks to them for playing such good hosts.
Their hospitality to Emily was happily typical of the TC folks’ hospitality throughout the day. They provided us (and visitors from St. Scholastica and Luther) with a generous lunch (standard CSci gastronomy: pizza, pop, cookies, and brownies!) and we had an excellent discussion about how to (successfully) apply for grad school, what it’s like being a grad student, how funding works, and the like. I’ve been writing letters of recommendation for students for over a decade, and I still managed to learn a few things, or at least think about them slightly differently. That discussion was also representative of a trend throughout the day of people saying really nice things about our graduates. It’s really nice when our students go out and do cool things to reinforce and spread the good name of UMM.
As well as getting to see Nick in his new professional role (and see Jennie and their daughter Allie, as well as their nice home), I got to spend quite a lot of time with Sara Drenner (formerly von Mosch). One of the faculty in her group (John Riedl) kindly invited me to join the group’s weekly seminar meeting. I hadn’t attended a seminar like that in quite a while, and it was really nice to be able to join them. I hadn’t had a chance to read the paper (“The small-world phenomenon: An algorithmic perspective” by Jon Kleinberg), so I didn’t have a lot to contribute, but it was still cool listening to an intelligent and interested group of people really get into a discussion of technical material.
At the reception at the end of the event Sara introduced me to John Carlis, who gave me a copy of his paper “Design: The key to writing (and advising) a one-draft Ph.D thesis”. The basic idea is that if your organize your ideas (i.e., design your paper) before you start banging out words, you’ll need a lot less revision. I’ll need to look this over, and perhaps share it with our senior seminar students.
I saw about a zillion posters in the morning session, including a nice summary of the work that Nick and Yongdae Kim (the other crypto guy in the TC department), lots of stuff from the Lens Group (where Sara works), as well as quite a few posters in both bioinformatics and computer graphics. The MovieLens project looks particularly cool and potentially fun for WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy to play with. The same group had a project where GPS enabled cell phones rang to notify you of “to-dos” in a location dependent fashion to help avoid the “I forgot to get milk on the way home” syndrome. I suffer badly from this problem, but don’t like cell phones, so I’m not sure it’ll save me quite yet, but a GPS enable PDA should work just as well. The basic idea, though, is that proximity to some location will trigger notification calls, e.g., as I’m walking/riding/driving past the grocery store, my phone will go off to remind me that I agreed to get milk on the way home. I sounds like it could be really helpful or really annoying, but their preliminary results were quite positive, so it’ll be interesting to see if this idea goes more mainstream.
I could also say a lot about the panel discussion on the relationship between agile development and more traditional development methodologies, but that’ll have to wait ’til another day.
And then we wrapped it up with dinner at Buca’s. There were 17 alums, 1 current student (Emily), and two faculty (Elena and myself). The students spanned from my first year here (Steve Damer, UMM ’95) to Emily, and included people working in industry as well as folks in academia. With that many people I obviously couldn’t chat with everyone, but it was still really nice to see all those people together and catching up or introducing themselves. People were very positive about it afterwards, and I definitely think we’ll try to make this a regular thing (every year?). I took a bunch of photos (such as the one above) and got names and current contact info in a notebook, and I’ll have to try to get the photos up somewhere soon.
It really was a fun day, and I think I got a lot of useful information and ideas out of the open house, and we all had a great time at dinner. Nick gets a big thanks for the invite that triggered it all, Sara gets a big thanks for showing me around, and Elena gets a major gold star for thinking up the dinner idea and helping make it happen! Huzzah!
