Rogue Wolves Home of the Wolfman

As some of you know, my brother Steve lives down in Southern California near San Diego which is where all the fires in California are burning. I've talked with Steve last night and he and his family are fine. There was a fire about six miles away but it is now contained and they are in no immediate danger and have not been evacuated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Before I talked with him I was pretty worried when I found the below google map marking the fires, evacuation areas, etc. He's pretty much surrounded by fires but they are fortunately far away still. Take a look at that map and see how wide spread the fires are. (Steve lives in San Marcos near Oceanside).

I've also been using Twitter to keep track of the latest news. News seems to break there way faster than the media networks. It's a great use for the technology. If you haven't used twitter it's like the Facebook status messages (*) but much more flexible in that you can choose to follow particular people or key words (tags) and be notified of new messages via twitter.com, SMS, Instant Messaging, etc. There is an API to the service so there are many different clients to access the service. Careful if you use the SMS feature because it can potentially send a lot of messages to your cell phone and may cost you some big $$$

(*) If you have no idea what a Facebook status message is, it's basically a simple way to tell people what you are doing, thinking, feeling, etc. It sounds mundane but it is actually a nice light weight way to keep people up to date on what is happening in your world. Twitter takes this a step further.

Examples of Twitter Commands

follow slangevi - this tells twitter to follow this user and notify you of their updates

leave slangevi - this tells twitter to stop notifying you of the users updates

track sandiegofire - this tells twitter to notify you of any twitter messages that contain this keyword

untrack sandiegofire - this tells twitter to stop notifying you of any twitter messages containing this keyword

Anyways, I thought the use of Google maps and twitter as public announcement tools was interesting and thought I'd pass it along.

Here is some Help on Twitter Commands. Note that the track/untrack command isn't listed as its a fairly new feature.

In preparation for getting braces I've had to have my four wisdom teeth extracted as well as four bicuspids removed. That's eight teeth in total for all you math wiz's out there! Sounds scary? Well it's not as bad as it sounds. Many people end up getting their wisdom teeth removed. Mine were impacted so it was time for them to go. The other four teeth are to make room so they can straighten my teeth. In the morning they had me take a valium before I arrived...man does that stuff kick your ass. I sat spaced out in the waiting room laughing at everything and drooling.

I had the operation this morning at 9am so I'm a bit loopy still. The pain hasn't really kicked in full tilt yet but my face has swollen and I now look like a chipmonk...since my dog Onyx is no friend to squirrels I'm hoping he won't attack me in my asleep. So far so good!

Side Note: Before I could get my teeth extracted my Orthodontist installed a "holding arch" which prevents the molars from moving after the teeth are extracted. Think if it as a roll-bar for your mouth. Brackets are installed on teeth on both sides of your mouth and a bar connects both sides of your teeth with a metal bar that runs along the roof of your mouth. Yes it uncomfortable. It's basically a food trapper. Fortunately I only need to have it in for two weeks. Here's a picture of the medieval torture device:

Also of note it took them six tries to put in an IV...not a confidence booster...I apparently have rolling veins. I don't remember ever having trouble before, but after the third try you kind of get pissy and just want them to get the damn thing in!

Then it was la-la land. They gave me the infamous "laughing gas" (Nitrous Oxide)...it does make you laugh because I laughed my ass off after the procedure...or maybe it was just my dark humour. After I woke up (I kept recalling that Seinfeld episode where Jerry thinks he's been violated while under). The whole procedure took four hours from operation time to when I woke up.

I've had a few of my great friends here taking care of me. Thanks Talitha! Thanks Scott! (who has been on call all day). I'm semi-lucid now and I'm sick of sleeping. They have me on anti-biotics and Prednisone to manage the pain.

After two weeks of recovery time I go in and actually get the braces installed and get this horid holding arch removed. yeah!

I was thinking I might take weekly photos of my teeth to show the progress of the correction. It could make a cool time lapse photography video when all is said and done.

Okay the Predisone is taking me down quickly so off to bed. I hope all is well with everyone.

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

Yes I'm still alive. I've just been too busy to blog lately. I have a new found respect for teachers. Daaaamn it's a lot of work. Preparing lectures, teaching, creating homework/tests, and marking...lots and lots of marking.

I'm also working part-time on two different research projects right now too. I'm heading to the 25th Army Science Conference in Orlando Florida at the end of November. It should be interesting. The keynote speaker was originally supposed to be Donald Rumsfeld but given the current political climate he may no longer be employed come time for the conference. Anyways, we are going down to show off a handheld prototype I helped build over the summer. It's a cultural advisor for troops. The device basically is a cultural knowledge base and reasoning engine that asks the user questions and gives them a confidence assessment of the situation. For instance you could be on patrol and see a group of men wearing black clothes chanting in the streets and the advisor device could inform the user that today is a religious holiday where the men of the culture parade in black clothing in the streets chanting prayers for the dead. The device knows about cultural information and using the GPS, date/time and information entered by the user can make predictions on the situation and advise the user on courses of action. The whole point is to give cultural information to troops that probably have little to no knowledge of the cultures they will have to interact with.

Additional uses for the device could be to gather information remotely and relay it on to a central command center that could aggregate all the information into a realtime overview of the battle space. In this scenario the handheld could also facilitate the relaying of information such as video, audio, enemy locations indicated on a map, etc.

The other research project I'm working on is building an information knowledge base and reasoning engine for the intelligence community. This project will be a full time research assistantship for me and has enough funding to keep me funded for several years. It's an exciting project and I'm looking forward to doing it full-time come January. I'll post more details on this project when I have more time but here are some buzzwords of what this project entails: Bayesian Networks, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Service Bus and ATOM

However, in the meantime my goal is to make it out of this semester alive.

I was a bit worried about funding for this up coming semester. The research project I've been working on over the summer won't be demoed in time at DARPA to receive any funding until possibly January at the earliest. I was faced with the prospect of paying for this semester out of my own pocket. Yikes!

However, I was informed the other day that I've been upgraded from a lab instructor to teaching a course this Fall. I'll be teaching CSCE 101 - Introduction to Computer Concepts which is a general overview of the landscape of Computer Science. Topics covered are computing history, computer technology, programming, networking, information technology and various other topics like the world wide web. It's a hodge podge of what computers are, how to use them and where things are heading.

Remember all those courses you took in undergrad that were taught by graduate students? I'll be one of "them". Hopefully I don't suck!

Now I just need to figure out how the hell to teach a course...