Rogue Wolves Home of the Wolfman

It's been a year since I started my PhD and during this time I've completed four of the sixteen courses I need to get a combined Masters/PhD. I should have my Masters in a year and another two years after that I'll have my PhD (hopefully). Also, during this time I turned thirty years old and have found way too many grey hairs on my head. All in all it's been a good experience and I'm glad I decided to go back to school. I'm learning quite a bit about things I knew/remembered little to nothing about (Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence, Reasoning and Statistics). I've been fortunate to be published in my first year and hopefully will have a couple publications this year.

Unlike my first year I've moved on from being a Teaching Assistant. I'm now a Research Assistant for the Center for Information Technology working under the advisement of Dr. Valtorta and Dr. Huhns. Our research project is a large one and has enough money to fund me and several students through 2010 provided the government doesn't change it's mind and cancel the project. This research is part of a larger research project composing a dozen other research teams. It is funded through the DTO (formerly known as ARDA) which is the Intelligence Community in the United States. Our part of the larger project is to build an integrated reasoning engine that combines logical and probabilistic reasoning and makes hypotheses on the vast amount of information the various agencies (CIA, Army Intelligence, NSA, etc etc) collect.

Where do I come in on all this? Well the whole system is a service oriented architecture that I am helping to build since that's my background and I'm also involved in research on the reasoner which is going to be using state of the art techniques (of which I know very little at this point). There will be much reading of research papers by me to get up to speed. I'm excited by the project and there should be lots of interesting dissertation topics in all this work.

In other news we are considering buying a house here in Florence SC since the property values are shooting up like crazy and rather than dump money into rent for another few years it would be nice to walk away with a net gain. Also, I'm considering getting braces. Yes you heard right! After years of crooked teeth (thanks for not staring!) I've decided enough is enough and since I'm hiding out in the sticks back at school I might as well improve myself physically as well. If I end up getting them expect much bitching about the pain and agony in the future.

Hopefully soon I'll post some more pictures of what we've been up to the last while. Robbi bought me a sweet camera for Christmas/my birthday and I'm still learning the ins and outs of it but it does take fantastic pictures compared to my aging Sony CyberShot P71