Category: Diary

Today, we had an annual Computer Science Graduate Student Association (CSGSA) BBQ in Hawrelak park. I’m not that familiar with guys there (and I’m generaly a shy person), so I didn’t participate in all activities there, but overally it was a good program for my Sunday. Well! Hawrelak park is a really beautiful place to walk or run on big fields of grass!
emmm … There, a big dog thought that we would be its owner, and it followed us for a few hundred meters. During that unwanted partnership, it bites a few bikers too and those people thought that it was our own dog!)

Well! Right now, I am learning LaTeX a tutorial and reading some LaTeX files simultaneously. It is a fun experiment, however, I do not like the deadline of the paper which I should prepare using this new word processor.
If LaTeX loves don’t kill me, I must express my doubt in the reason of using such a difficult method for word processing. What’s the problem of using a good written WYSIWYG software? Flexibility?

Today, I wrote 2800 words (15K characters) of my thesis discussing behavior evolution experiments. I am really tired of reporting and writing and …, but it is almost done. I must write a conclusion, then re-read all I’ve written till now, and then put figures in their place. After that, I can print my thesis.

Last night, I dreamt John Nash!
It was a conference in Japan or somewhere alike – and if I should name the conference, it was something like IROS04 (maybe due to it was my only international conference). My advisor and I were trying to find rooms in a hotel that was almost filled. After placing our luggage in the hotel, we went down. During this room seeking job, I saw many famous people which I recognized then but I cannot remember right now (I guess those people do not actually exist in the real world). Well … outside the hotel, my advisor became curious to see John Nash. He did not know him but I knew (again: I have not seen his real face until an hour before. emmm … not very similar.). Someone introduced us to him. He greeted us. My advisor tried to speak to him. I don’t know what happened, but I remember that the speech continued between John Nash and me. I wanted to persuade him that interpreting the neural network as a multi-person game would be interesting (e.g. seeing learning as a cooperative game and … ) and I insisted him to do some research on artificial intelligence. I felt that he became interested in the subject. Unfortunately, my dream broke and we could not discuss any more.
Isn’t it interesting that I dream this way? Am I going to become mad?!

The Problem of Representation is the Problem of Truth! (Saint Machinous Intelligous)

Happy New Year!!!
Happy Norooz!!!

Today is the first day of Farvardin and the beginning of the new 1384 year. Persian (Iranian) calendar, which is called Khorshidi (=Solar), is the most exact calendar of the world that has only a day of error in every some million years. Its beginning is aligned with the start of the spring. There are many myths about it which I will not tell you! (:

Nothing very special … I am waiting for my admissions (and rejections!) to do a final decision. I cannot understand the reason someone might reject me. Nevertheless, those “You are very good, but there is no sufficient accommodations” is not a good explanation for rejecting me. So, I am angry at those guys at the current moment!!!
Well … I changed the title of Thesilog to “Hands off Iran … “. This change can be considered as political act – in the notion of Hannah Arendt (right spelling?). What does it mean? It means that I don’t want U.S.A troops to come to our country and help us getting rid of Mullahs (priest who rule Persia (Iran) ). I do not like Mullahs at all, but I don’t believe that a bloody war is the best way one can do. Beside that, I cannot believe that those troops are very kind people. Moreover, …
What else?! emmm … Apparently, Norooz (or Nowrouz) is coming fast. For those who do not know, Norooz (=New Day) is the first day of the Persians new year. It is the beginning of the spring (1st of Farvardin; usually 21 March) in which we celebrate and doing some fun and etc.

Well … nothing else!

Trying to reinvent the wheel for a while opens your insight as a tire maker! (Quote by myself!)

Hmmm … I am trying to reinvent robot’s map building method before really reading the detailed stuff. Right now, I am reinventing the Hans Moravec’s Evidence Grid. It is working and I know (don’t ask me from where because I must say that I took a small look to formulas of a few papers (; ) that it is not exactly the same.
I consider the belief of occupancy as P(occupy) (so, 0=Sebastian Thrun’s. I am interested to see the exact formulation of his usage of particle filters.

-I am going to submit my paper to CDC-ECC 2005 conference. Hmmm … I want to blog it online to see what happens!
-I have just finished struggling with this idiot MS Word XP that changes the appearance of my papers every time I load the document. Let’s go to the site … I have not bookmarked the page, so I must use Google … yeap!! it is there! (12:02PM)
-Now, look for the page that I must submit my paper. Today’s morning, I got my PaperPlazza’s PIN code. So, I do not need to get it again. My Internet connection is a bit slow and I must wait a little so that my weblog become updated (12:04PM).
-I found it and I am going to PaperPlaza right now!
According to the site, the conference is this: 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference ECC 2005 (CDC-ECC’05), December 12-15, 2005, Seville, Spain Well, I may not attend it by myself, but my co-author would probably do so. Click! (12:08PM – I am not that slow … blogging while reading instructions while … is not that easy! Try it!)
-My paper is regular paper, so go to that part …
-It says that I can test my PDF before going on! It is a good idea. Let’s test it! Hope it works (PLZ!!!) (12:13PM)
-oops … it says that it cannot detect my paper size (A4 or Letter). let’s see what is the problem … 🙁
-I used the CDC-ECC 02 template. The margin and … was the same as the standard A4 paper. emmm …
-I used PDFFactory to generate my files and it causes error. CutePDF does not have this problem, but the output is not that cute. (12:39PM)
-Well … I have uploaded it using CutePDF generated PDF. (1:09PM) So, it seems that is finished now!
This may be the first online blogging of a real paper submission! wow!

Yeap!!! The first!