Well, it has been a month since my last post, but note that this is an improvement. The average interval between posts used to be 6 months.
First, the obvious. I have not died! Yes, the deadline for the paper has come and gone and I didn't finished it, as expected. But, in an unexpected turn of events, the symposium's program committee decided to extend the deadline in 4 more days, from January 11th to 15th. And there went I to expend a few more nights without sleep. But it was worth. I could finish the paper for the new deadline and the final result was above my own expectations. (I'm not saying it was good, but I expected to do something much worst.) So, what was sure to be a complete failure ended up being just a partial failure, and maybe will still lead to a relative success if the paper get accepted for the symposium.
After that, a seminar to present, two progress reports to write, the final report for SYSPRO , Advanced Systems Development Research Project (in english), and a new research topic to find. The seminar was OK, the progress reports were finished on time, the final report for SYSPRO was also finished on time, but the new research topic is something that has not yet presented itself. Today my adviser send me an e-mail with a CFP (call for participation) on the "5th Workshop on Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence". That rouse my interest. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is something about what I have been fascinated since the first time I read about the subject. I studied it during my undergraduate course and during my master course. My master thesis is somehow related to the subject and I have a reasonable knowledge about it. Maybe I can find some intersection between the two topics interesting enough to work with, and that can lead to some substantial result in the little time that I have left. (This is my last year on the Ph.D. and I must have published my papers by September, or risk not graduating on April next year.)
Right now, for the short term, I have three tasks at hand: (a) define my new research topic, something that is a continuation of my work up to here, but that add something new; (b) prepare the final presentation, something like a poster session, for SYSPRO, on next February 18th; (c) improve the system I have developed so far (the infamous multi-valued bounded model checker) to allow "normal" people to graphically see what the cryptic numeric result provided by the system means.
Besides that, it is still cold in Japan. Even snowed in Tsukuba yesterday. Not too much but enough to cover the cars with some 10cm o snow. And last Thursday I broke a tooth while eating, and
received my black belt. I was very happy! (Because of the black belt, not for the broken tooth.)
There are more pictures on my web album.
