I’m published in CACM! (But not in the way one might have thought)

CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS
CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS

The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.

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Wordle makes tag clouds all pretty

Just stumbled across Wordle, a neat tag cloud/text visualization tool, and am having way too much fun.

Some of my most common Flickr tags (click on the cloud to see it bigger on Wordle’s site):

Nic’s Flickr tags

The contents of the front page of my blog as of 3 July 2008:

Nic’s blog tag cloud

I like how the latter captures our time in Spain quite nicely, and I really like how Wordle can intermingle the ascenders and descenders. Wordle can grind pretty hard on your CPU, but there are lots of neat options to play with and some very fun results to be had. w00t!

Thanks to banned photography inc for the tip.

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