I am win!

k_state gave me a Faculty Development Award of $1800 for IJCAI-2005, where I will present a paper I got into one of the topical workshops. (This one was actually nontrivially refereed, though workshops are still much easier to get papers into than the technical tracks of IJCAI and UAI.) I will also attend several tutorials and have eckypecky attend a couple as well, if she can get her stuff stored before she moves to Jardine.

This morning at 10:30, I had a nice meeting with Paul Lowe, our Assistant Vice Provost for Research, on massforge. In five yearsweeks the CorleoneKDD Family will be completely legitimatecontractually sound! I also talked with him about how to confirm that we are intellectual property (IP) compliant, avoid being assimilated by the Microsoft Collective over Auggie, etc. ETA, 17:25 CDT Thu 19 May 2005: Turns out Auggie is ex-Borg already.

At 11:15, I headed over to Throckmorton to check on the Theoretical Plant Modeling lab of Steve Welch, who is the lead PI of our NSF FIBR Project on Ecological Genomics of Arabidopsis Development (EGAD)¹. I am ordering four Dell Dimension 3000 systems (Pentium 4, 3GHz, 1Gb RAM, 160Gb HD, for $950 plus S&H) for his lab, a 4-port KVM, a couple of 10/100 NICs, and a 24-port 10/100 switch. Well, it turns out that four of the systems he has decommissioned and were about to be junked were Gateway E-4200s (Pentium 3 450MHz), and two were HP Vectras (P6-180s). I called tmehlinger last night and he showed up with two of his buddies and assimilated them into the massforge collective.

¹ When we scientists get to select our own acronyms, the result in inevitably geeky. I had to explain to Erika Charbit, the Ecological Genomics/FIBR postdoc, that "Egad" is an English exclamation roughly equivalent to "Zut alors!" (BTW, that is eckypecky's site - what do you all think of it?)

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Banazir