"Fear not!" he repeated for dramatic effect. "Long have I desired to look upon the likenesses of Elendil and Anarchion, my sires of old. Under their shadow Elessar, the Elfstone son of Arathon son of Aradud of the House of Wupdidu Elendil's son, heir of Isildur, scion of the lords of Andunie..." - and in this fashion he continued rambling on through his pedigree for the better part of an hour - "... has nothing to fear!"
Then the light of his eyes faded, and he spoke to himself: "Where was I? Oh, a quest to destroy the One Ring and overthrow Sauron. Right."
-Chapter II.9, "The Grey Liver" (banazir), The Lord of The... Whatever (Jensen author site)

Hrm. I noticed today during CIS 830 (Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence) that I really do have a very digressive lecture style.¹ My students (scottharmon, hermes_imagod, chriszhong, and robbyjo) could have told you that years ago.² :-)

Just to give you an example, today's lecture was on Bayesian networks in time series analysis, and in the space of 30-40 minutes, I rambled through discussions on:

• Our Office of Naval Research (ONR) project (1994-1998)


• Our Naval Research Lab (NRL) project (1997-2001)


• Noisy-OR Bayesian networks (a IAAI-1998 paper with Eugene Grois and Misha Voloshin, and David C. Wilkins)


• The concept of predictive validation

The lecture before that:

• Bioinformatics³


• Cancer research: pharmaceuticals and pathways


• Genetic basis for other conditions and diseases (autoimmune, etc.)


• Combatting world hunger through:
  
  
  
  • identifying plant immune defense response genes
  
  
  • isolating yield-determinant gene networks and developing GMOs
  
  
  
  
• A 10-minute crash primer in microarray technology (at least they asked questions about structural, functional, and comparative molecular genomics)

et bien sûr, I can't resist those French chef digressions. But I, uh, digress.
At least I didn't launch into my MS/MD/CF tangent that turns lecture into a telethon.

A couple of lectures before that, one of my students came up and asked me about Paul Churchland's books and the philosophy of mind. I couldn't resist giving him the Chalmers ref, and let me tell you, wondergurl_77, I'm amazed I got out of there before we both starved! :-)

I think you are made of information.
The rapidity of links rivals a search engine.
-twinbee

Seriously now: Troy was asking about why (according to the professor of his philosophy course), modern philosophy of AI no longer distinguishes between cognition and action, nor between cognition and phenomenology. I replied that the former was probably an outgrowth of the theory of intelligent agents, the latter of subsumption of brain state into world state (which is a more general thing). Any ideas?

---

Edit, 14:45 CST Tue 24 Feb 2004: On Fri 20 Feb 2004 we had a visit from KSU-CIS Distinguished Lecturer Bob Harper of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I visited with Dr. Harper from 13:30 to 14:00 and we talked briefly about our work with transactional and objective views of workflows, the bioinformatics information Grid, the my^Grid group, TAVERNA, and SCUFL. At 15:30 he gave a talk on trustless Grid computing in ConCert.

¹ In all seriousness, this is probably one source of my trouble with grantwriting and techwriting, which require very precise focus and clarity.

² Notes to self: Don't cram too much into a 50-minute lecture.
Slow down towards the end of lecture. People have mentioned on my teaching evaluations that I tend to speed up towards the end, in order to finish my slides, so I might actually redistribute or even move some of them to lectures recorded offline (as scottharmon suggested). What do you all think?

³ Here's a really good life sciences portal whose link I sent masteralida the other day for her daughter to use.

--
Banazîr