Rob Margolies, a Ph.D. student in my research group, has recently written a great blog post about why Ph.D. students push themselves so hard. In short, it is because we really feel that we are learning and growing, in many different, partially self-selected, ways.
A video of a talk I recently gave at Microsoft Research Seattle is now available online. In this talk I introduced the Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags Project and talked about my contributions to the project and to the overall space of networking ultra-low-power energy harvesting nodes: environmental energy characterizations, energy harvesting adaptive algorithms, and testbed design and development.
MIT Technology Review has recently published an interesting article on why mobile ads do not (yet) lead to high revenues. As a reason, they are citing advertisers’ troubles with identifying whether the ads are working. Specifically, they trace these troubles to lack of unique user identification, especially across different devices, and instances of people seeing an ad on a mobile phone, but buying the advertised object using a computer. It is very interesting how seemingly minute technical issues lead to the under-use of such promising technologies.
I found a lovely summary of the typical reasons Ph.D. students struggle and fail. Well worth reading over for inspiration and reflection.
My favorite part: “A Ph.D. is not the final undertaking. It’s the start of a scientific career. A Ph.D. does not have to cure cancer or enable cold fusion. At best a handful of chemists remember what Einstein’s Ph.D. was in. Einstein’s Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate Avogadro’s number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.
He still got a Ph.D. “
It never ceases to amaze me how deeply personally satisfactory it feels to do something you thought you could never do. Having had knee troubles for many years (me and my knee troubles go back years, all the way back to when I fractured my kneecap in a cycling accident), even as I was running 1/2 marathons and triathlons, I was sure that full marathons were not for me. Too much pounding. Too much pain. No, definitely not for me.
And — I did it! Did it did it did it! Philadelphia marathon 2012, 4:04. Beautiful day and a wonderfully organized race. Philly has a special place in my heart as the first US city I visited, so running my first marathon here was really fitting. And I ran my very first marathon in the T-shirt I got at my first ever running race, the 2008 Newport 10K. And my knee was absolutely fine, too (although getting it to be fine with this distance took years of work).
Past the race: I’m a marathoner!
I have not been keeping up with Canadian NSERC grant options, and only now discovered Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships, that offer attractive postdoctoral salaries to both Canadian and international researchers. Fantastic opportunities for foreigners that want to build a scientific career in Canada; I really hope these are well-advertised in non-Canadian institution.
Excellent article on misconceptions about startup jobs for technical people — http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-your-time-in-crappy-startup-jobs/
Many points are dead on, yet somehow very rarely get stated. A tidbit that resonates with me: startups are often perceived as places where engineers will be changing the world. Yet, as the article correctly points out, “with some exceptions, startups are generally not vehicles for world-changing visions. Startups need to think about earning revenue within the existing world, not changing humanity as we know it. Most of them are application-level concepts that fill out an existing world-changing trend (like the Internet) but not primary drivers. “
Long before I even started exercising, I caught, randomly, a Canadian TV special dedicated to the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon race. It seemed insane — people swim over 2km from the Alcatraz Island to the San Fransisco shore, then bike on San Fransisco hills, and then also run 8 miles, also on these crazy hills! Insane! What kind of a crazy person would want to do this, I thought.
Fast forward 5 years, and — last week, I did it. Forced myself to jump off the San Fransisco Belle into the very cold water with the coast barely even visible, battled currents for far too long and then biked the hills and ran the beautiful but treacherous 8 miles on all sorts of terrain including the soft pacific sand. Fantastic experience.
Finishing up the race with the biggest smile on my face:
I received the 2011 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications earlier this month at the 2011 IEEE GLOBECOM award ceremony in Houston, TX. This award recognizes papers that open new lines of work, envision bold approaches to communication, formulate new problems to solve, and essentially enlarge the field of communications engineering.
More information about the paper and the awards, via Columbia University School of Engineering: EE/CS Paper Wins National Award for New Communication Topics.
We have put together a video of the EnHANTs testbed demonstration, based on the demonstration we presented — and got the Best Student Demo Award for — at ACM SenSys 2011 back in November. The video is available here.
