Greetings, and welcome back. The 2005-2006 academic year is nearly upon us, and in honor of that event I would like to have our first group meeting on Tuesday, August 30.
The group now consists of Anagha, Apurva, Mahesh, and Saiyam. Anagha and Apurva are of course continuing on in their second year with me as their thesis advisor, Mahesh is advised by Rich Maclin but we have found a few things of mutual interest that we can work on, and Saiyam will be continuing on after working with me in the summer. I do not know if I will have any new first year students - this is always decided a few weeks into the semester, so we will see. I hope that I do have a new student or two, but if I don't you can see that we have a reasonably sized group already. In any case, it is the four of you who are invited to the meeting, so please let me know if for some reason you can't attend or if there are bad times for you that day. You will of course find the department in a bit of chaos next week. The new graduate students should be here, and they will be going through orientation. Hopefully you will have already met some or all of them, and I am sure you will remember your own transitions here and you will do your best to be helpful (within reason). You will also find, maybe, a new elevator! Or you will find men with jack hammers surrounded by clouds of dust. I do think it's important that you get started on thesis related work during this first week back, but you may find the labs not quite ready for use. The construction that was supposed to occur in HH 334 and 330 (turning them into one room that will be some sort of virtual reality lab) remains undone, and who knows when that will start. It's also unclear if HH 338 or MWAH 187 will be ready, and who will be where. So, my advice regarding the first week or so is to make sure you have a computer up and running at home, or make use of the computers in the library. During our meeting on August 30, I would like to review my own summer with you. It was very busy, but interesting, and I learned quite a bit. I attended two conferences (ACL and AAAI) and a summer school (EuroLan), and I will tell you a bit about each. I also worked on a few things here at UMD that I can share with you. Anagha and Mahesh likewise attended a conference (ACL) and I would like for them to give some thought to which three talks (papers or invited) were most interesting for them, and to at least briefly mention what they were and why they were interesting. You can find an example of what I mean by "most interesting" in my own postings to this list - I mentioned one such talk earlier this summer, and will come up with a few more for Tuesday. It is important, I think, that by the time you start your second year that you have a pretty good idea of where you will be at this time next year (or where you would like to be). So, please prepare an answer to the following - where do I hope to be in September 2006? Finishing your thesis at my side is not an acceptable answer. :) If you have thoughts of further study, I will start to talk about the process you must now be engaged in. There are two issues - one is to make sure you are properly prepared in terms of making your application, and the second is to make sure that you are properly prepared in terms of your course work and thesis work. We will make sure to plan accordingly. Also, I will be interested to hear how you spent your summers. I know, to some degree, what each of you have been doing, but I am sure that some of you don't know much about what the other has been up to. So, let's plan on spending a few minutes where each of us talks informally about our summer's activities. It can be serious intellectual stuff, or it can be whatever you think was interesting or fun. I am always very happy at the start of a new school year. It is a time, I think, to wipe the slate clean, and get off to a fresh start. So, I will urge you to not think too highly of your previous accomplishments, and not to dwell upon previous failures or disappointments. Think mostly about what you would like to accomplish this year, and then beyond. As a part of our meeting, I will do my best to come up with short "todo lists" for each of you. I know that getting started in the new year is sometimes confusing, so I'll have at least a few very specific issues for each of you to deal with during that first week. We'll set the exact meeting time once I know more about the schedule on Tuesday. There may be a thesis defense, etc. and we'll want to avoid conflicts with such events. See you soon, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse ------------------------ Yahoo! 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