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" (
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 (
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,
I think you are made of information.
The rapidity of links rivals a search engine.
-
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 myGrid 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


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
3 Here's a really good life sciences portal whose link I sent
--
Banazîr