Today was the third day of our site visit from our project sponsors at AIdentity Matrix Medical, Surya Ramachandran and Dr. Harold Sun. Surya, Harold, and I (all UIUC veterans) spent the morning discussing the XML schema for our R&D project.

Present were our team members:

• William H. Hsu (banazir)


• Roby Joehanes (robbyjo)


• Chris H. Meyer


• Silpan Patel


• James W. Plummer

We had lunch at the Bluemont Room and snapped some photos.

Then I went to first half of the the practice thesis defense (1350 - 1420) for one of my M.S. students, Vinod Chandana.
Vinod's real defense (for a thesis on parallel genetic programming) will occur on Tue 09 Dec 2003.

Another M.S. student of mine, Siddharth Chandak, will defend first, on Mon 08 Dec 2003.
Siddharth has written a thesis on improving Bayesian network inference. He is using adaptive importance sampling to improve the convergence rate of bounded cutset conditioning.

After Vinod's practice defense, I went to a Ph.D. oral exam (1435 - 1545) for Judong Shen, on whose committee I serve. Judong is working on kernel methods - specifically, supervised concept learning and regression with support vector machines (SVM).

Finally, I attended the last Graduate Council meeting of the semester (1600 - 1700). Whew!

Next semester's grad student group: Chris Zhong, Julie A. Thornton (affiliate), Edwin Rodríguez (affiliate), Ann Pattaracharivanon, Scott Harmon, Roby Joehanes.

Hokay, I'm orf!
I'll be heading out for Ames, IA at 0900 tomorrow morning, to give the CS colloquium at Iowa State on Thu 04 Dec 2003.
If all goes well, I'll be back before CIS 732 on Fri 05 Dec 2003.
I'm bringing both of my digicams (but only Numerramar this time), and will psot another pictorial travellogue, but probably not as detailed as my last one. :-)

--
Banazîr