This post originally appeared on my previous blog.
After my one-year evaluation, the first thing I did was sign up for a course on presentation skills. To be honest, I hesitated a bit at first, but I started hearing quite a few good things about Art of Presenting Science, so I decided to see for myself what that was all about. I really, really loved it! I can’t really summarize my experiences in a few sentences, so perhaps I will dedicate a whole post to this. I tried to put a few of the things I learned to the test when presenting my work at the meeting of the NVPHBV (Dutch Society for Pattern Recognition and Image Processing), and at the Benelearn conference in Gent, Belgium.
As for research, I was pursuing several directions that are relevant to Multiple Instance Learning, learning with dissimilarities, or both. A few of these ideas resulted in submissions to conferences, while others were abandoned after a while. Perhaps “abandoned” is not the correct word to describe the situation, and “on the shelf” would be better. The ideas are still very interesting, but at the time I did not have enough insight to turn them into something that could be published. I hope that I will have more luck with this in 2013 🙂
In the summer it was time to take a break from my own research, and learn a lot about what others are doing at the Machine Learning Summer School in Santa Cruz, California in the US. The summer school consisted of two weeks of lectures from people from academia and from industry. The proximity to Silicon Valley ensured a lot of interesting talks by Google, Facebook and other companies that have a lot of data and therefore do a lot of machine learning. Next to all the talks, it was a great experience to meet other researchers from all of the world and compare notes on everything from doing a PhD to making tacos. I hope we will meet again!
As if that wasn’t enough traveling, I received the decisions on two papers that were submitted a few months ago. Both were accepted as poster presentations: “Does one rotten apple spoil the whole barrel” at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), and “Class-Dependent Bag Dissimilarities for Multiple Instance Learning” at the Structural, Syntactic and Statistical Pattern Recognition (S+SSPR) workshop. S+SSPR was held in Hiroshima, and ICPR was held in Tsukuba, close to Tokyo. With an extra day to recover from jetlag and a few days (because three weeks in the US aren’t cheap) for sightseeing, this meant a two-week trip to Japan. One of my posters in action:
I enjoyed both conferences although they were completely different from each other. S+SSPR was very small, which allowed informal discussions more often and attending a lot of the talks. I also noticed the same type of close community (but with a different subset of researchers) that I saw at Multiple Classifier Systems a year earlier. ICPR was very big, which was a new experience for me. The program booklet was as large as the proceedings of some conferences! Therefore it was quite difficult to choose which talks to attend. I found out that often, my first impression (such as “this is relevant to my research” or “I won’t understand this at all”) was wrong. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by a few talks about unrelated topics, but given by a great presenter. There is still a lot to learn for me there.
Although I thought I could deal with time differences pretty well, I did have a few sleepless nights in Japan. On one of these nights, I had an idea about the relationship of my own work to a quite successful MIL classifier. Who wouldn’t get inspired if you are surrounded by wonderful things like this:
Instead of scribbling the idea down with a few words, arrows etc, which is what I usually do, I actually started writing the paper. I didn’t get very far while I was in Japan, but I did discuss the idea and let it develop. After the decision to made to submit a paper to Multiple Classifier Systems 2013 (I admit, I loved MCS 2011 so much I just couldn’t resist), the whole process of writing and submitting the paper cost me about a month. Perhaps that might be long for some people, but for me it was definitely a record. I’m also very happy with the process, so perhaps I will try this more often (starting to write a paper as soon as the idea is there).