Northward Bound

So, myself and five mates are headed into the Aussie outback for the next two weeks (don’t be alarmed if I’m out of touch – I should have internet, but I can’t guarantee it) for some diving, fishing, and general relaxation. It’ll be good to immerse myself in Australia before heading to Seattle (after the 40 degree days we’ll get up there, I’ll definitely welcome snow), and it’ll be the last time I travel with my friends for a while.

We’ve got an early start tomorrow since we’ll be getting up bright and early in order to have time to reach Kalbarri before nightfall. Then it will be on to Coral Bay, Exmouth and Yardie Creek. To to said early start, I’ll leave it at that and resume blogging when I get back (hopefully with some photos).

Graduated with First Class Honours!

I’m proud to say that I’ve just received my marks, and I’ve completed my course with First Class Honours in Mechatronics Engineering as well as a degree in Computer Science (unfortunately, honours was not available for the latter except with an additional year of study). So now I’m an engineer!

I’ve begun getting my documents ready for the visa process, while at the same time planning my trip up North. I’ll be away with friends from the 15th December to January 1st, giving me plenty of time to soak up the heat of the Australian outback before I head to snowy Seattle in February.

Exciting times, with more to come.

Free!

My last ever exam is done – I now have a fair chunk of sleep to catch up on, so a proper blog post will have to wait a bit. But it feels great!

A week to go

In one week from now, I’ll be done with uni forever (well, until I go back for an MBA or something ). That’s going to take a while to get used to, but I’m definitely ready for a break – given my internship a year ago, and my thesis project this year, I haven’t really had more than a few days off at a time for around 18 months. It’ll be really good to be able to actually do some light travel with friends, and hopefully get over to Sydney to see my relatives there (luckily my Melbournite relatives are coming over here in a few weeks).

There’s a bit of work to be done in the form of packing and getting a visa, but I don’t anticipate too much trouble there. So I’ll be working on a bit of a side project in this time which should hopefully lead to something cool in the future – but more on that in a couple of weeks.

For now, it’s back to hitting the books one last time.

The End is Nigh

Thought I’d write a quick blog post to help stave off final-year-project insanity.

My thesis draft is due tomorrow afternoon, and the document is slowly but surely starting to look better. As expected, there was nowhere near enough time for me to conduct the full range of experiments I wanted to, but given the scope I initially set myself, I’m pretty happy with the amount I’ve done in the time I’ve had. The nice thing about it all is that I’ve created two frameworks for learning agents in Robocode, and hopefully people will pick these up in the future and be able to run further experiments on their own.

My thesis gets handed in on October 26th, and my final exam is on November 11th. After that, I have three months to enjoy summer before heading to a mystical land of snow and ice (well, perhaps it’s not mystical per say, but coming from Perth, ice and snow are pretty much a thing of legend).

I’ll probably do more updates in the coming weeks, as my braid is slowly deep-fried by the process of having to finish a project which seemed like it would never end (in a good way – it’s been awesome exploring AI at this level).

Trust your feelings

It’s late. I should be asleep. I have a lecture in a few hours. But I stayed up late working on an assignment (Matlab GUIs are pretty simple, but fun to play with), and on an impulse, looked into my thesis code to have a quick crack at tracking down a bug that has been a persistent PitA for the last 2 months. Lo and behold, it took roughly 15 minutes to solve. Looks like I really am a night owl.

Speaking of Night Owls, I watched Watchmen again last week, and decided to dress up as Rorshach for a (super-hero-themed) costume party on the weekend. Problem was, I got the costume wayyy too perfect and scared a whole bunch of people. This reminds me – have to drop the costume back tomorrow. Amidst all the chaos of uni & life, such things get forgotten. The annoying thing is I tried returning it on Tuesday, and the store decided to be closed when I arrived. Sigh.

In other news, Yanchep conference next Wednesday. Will be nice to actually see some good projects and get a feeling for how I might be able to comprehensively explain two highly complex learning methodologies in 15 minutes, and still have time to talk about the actual experiments I’ve run.

Back to School!

Well, here I am, starting my final semester ever of uni (9 down, 1 to go, woohoo!). It’s pretty exciting to be close the the end, plus I only have 2 units (mech engineering ones) this semester, in addition to my final year project of course, which itself is moving ahead swimmingly.

Been a while since I’ve posted here, due to the fact that blogging is still rather new to me and when I don’t have anything to say, I always go ahead and don’t say it. But getting to the final step of my academic career is a big relief. Not that I hate my studies; far from it. The lecturers are good, the subjects interesting, and uni life is hardly something to complain about. But after spending long enough doing something, you get the urge to move on. 5 years isn’t too bad when you consider how many students do honours/masters/phds, and I’ve got pretty good mileage from those years (2 degrees + some level of honours in engineering depending on how the project goes), but in Redmond I realised that as exciting as the discovery of learning is, the excitement of applying that learning to get real results is just that much greater.

So I look forward to finishing in mid-November. Imma going to go on a bit of a road trip with my other friends who are also finishing their degrees, then spend some time in Perth/Sydney with family before heading off at the end of February (given that all goes well with the visa).

But I’m counting chickens: first I’ve got to get these here eggs incubated and safe.

Natal

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, uni seems to have had the better of me lately. Exams are coming up, then it’s back to the Final Year Project.

But it’s not my academic woes which holds my attention. Microsoft recently unveiled “Project Natal”, their controller-less motion controller, and I’m very very excited to see such a big step towards their 2019 vision. One of the less-discussed ramifications of au-naturale control is whether this will change the nature of entertainment from a service to an interaction. Many modern forms of media simply feed information to their audience, and as one of my professors suggested, this may very well lead to poor researching skills and an inability to know what sources to trust. However, if one has to actively engage with the medium in order to extract information, higher-level brain functions are invoked and real thought occurs.

The same is even more true when it comes to games – the use of a controller affords players the ability to make virtually mindless reflex decisions, with no real requirement beyond a vague understanding of their context. Physical engagement tends to bring mental engagement – their will be less idle flicking through menus, and more time spent considering what actions are actually worth taking.

At least, that’s what I hope. Anything that makes people think must be good.

Back in action

Now that my final project for this semester has been handed in, I finally think I can start posting here again, and get started on all the stuff I’ve been putting off. Of course, there’s still my Final Year Project (not to mention exams!) – no rest for the wicked.

Tanking the lead

Well, long time no post. I guess that I really did hit the ground running when I came back to Perth – catching up on the first week of uni, seeing friends again, getting special permissions for my course (to take Computer Networks), and of course getting started with my thesis.

While it’s nowhere near the length of a dedicated honours project, let alone a phd, my thesis project still presents an opportunity to work on some really cool stuff. I’ve always been passionate about the idea of teaching computers to learn for themselves, to act in ways we can expect and appreciate. As a result, I’ll be studying learning algorithms, using a neat little framework called Robocode.

Robocode is a Java application where miniture tanks fight battles to the death (no CS project is complete without explosions), and what makes it great is that while it’s really simple to start coding, creating a master bot truly takes a long time and a ton of effort. Of course, my plan is to simplify things by putting the bulk of my effort into creating a learning mechanism for the bot, so that it can develop the winning traits on its own. No easy task, but since when were the most worthwhile things easy to do?

Aside from that, life goes on. Being back at uni has certainly made me miss the homework-less environment of Microsoft – I can’t wait to head back next year. I’ve taken the stance that this year should help me prepare for the high expectations that they and I have for myself – hence my choice of units and project. I gained a lot of confidence in myself while I was in Seattle, so now it’s time to take things to the next level and write some really innovative stuff.