Daniel’s Blog

I’m now, officially, half way through (ish) my Masters in Machine Learning and Data Mining at the University of Bristol… and I’ve got a decision to make very soon.

When I started my MSc I thought “yeah, I’ll do the MSc and then go straight onto a PhD“. It has now come to the time when I need to decide if I do want to go straight onto a PhD, and if so in which area. I’ve already seen one of my Professors about it, who would be happy to supervise me as long as I have an interesting idea to research and I get a reasonable grade for my MSc…. so that’s not an issue.

The problem that I am having is that, although I really really would love to do a PhD, I do really really want to have a normal and stable lifestyle… which is very hard to have while doing a PhD in addition to only getting the very minimalistic funding that a studentship provides. Which means that there is the proper full-time working again.

There are lots of options, and at the moment the more favourable one is working for one or two years (at least) after the MSc and then doing a PhD later on in life (for instance, if I start it in two years time I’ll be 26 and should still have finished it before I’m 30).

If I did start the PhD from next year, which isn’t necessarily favourable at this precise moment, I would be in one (or a couple) of the following fields:

• Logic Programming (particularly ILP).
• Semantics (Description Logic and/or the Semantic Web) and/or Pragmatics (potentially the Pragmatic Web).
• Natural Language Processing.
• Artificial Intelligence applied to the Study of the Humanities/Society and Liberal Arts.
• Computational Imagination.
• Can computers attain wisdom? Or tap into Sophia? (Artificial Wisdom / Artificial Spiritual Wisdom).

So much to think about. If you’d like to contact me about anything I’ve written in this blog post (or elsewhere), then please do get in touch. I’m always happy to hear from people, and discuss things in detail.

Many many thanks for reading, and so many thanks for those who have and will be supporting me through my decisions.

Daniel

Greenbelt 2008

Greenbelt festival 2008 was really fantastically good! Michael Franti & Spearhead are an awesome band, as are Aradhna. Plus my church (Foundation Bristol) did a fantastic service where they told the story about the Tower of Babel using some funky music and interesting visuals (it was quite “New Media” style and “Emerging“) (”To Confuse is to Liberate!”). I actually feel more enlightened after the whole weekend, and Beki and I have booked our tickets for Greenbelt 2009 and are even thinking about running our own event!

At the event I bought a didgeridoo and a Peruvian Ocarina. I also learnt how to sing Taize, Iona and Gregorian Chants and Songs.

Linked Data SemanticBible

Development of the Linked Data version of the SemanticBible is going well, and a big thank you to Sean Boisen of semanticbible.com for assisting us with various things. I’ll be working on hooking the ontologies in with various other ontologies around the Linked Data Cloud.

Fishes

It seems like two of my oranda fish are “getting it on”… having lots of little baby fish is going to be quite scary. Not sure what I’ll do with them!

Hospital

I went to hospital this morning for my Dilated Cardiomyopathy (for the first time in Bristol), they took 7 tubes of blood out of me, gave me an ECG. They are also going to book me in for an Echocardiogram appointment and potentially a treadmill, they will also be sending me a week-long heart monitor device. Also, rather unfortunately, I’ve got to double up on my Bisoprolol (a beta-blocker) which means that I’m going to probably experience some periods of fatigue while I get used to the new dosage

Bristol Knowledge Unconference

Bristol Knowledge Unconference organisation is going really really well. I sent out a few emails to people on the registration list this morning, letting them know a bit more about the style and organisation of the event. And I’m formally publicising the following event structure:

All times are pm:-

• 2:00 - 2:15 : Arrival & Whiteboard Scribbling (for the set-on-the-day talks)
• 2:15 - 2:20 : Introduction to the event
• 2:20 - 2:50 : 1st Preset Talk
• 2:50 – 2:55 : Setup
• 2:55 - 3:25 : 2nd Preset Talk
• 3:25 – 3:35 : Break & Whiteboard Scribbling (for the set-on-the-day talks)
• 3:35 - 4:05 : 1st set-on-the-day Talk
• 4:05 – 5:05 : Setup
• 4:05 - 4:35 : 2nd set-on-the-day Talk
• 4:35 – 4:45 : Break
• 4:45 - 5:15 : 3rd set-on-the-day Talk
• 5:15 – 5:20 : Setup
• 5:20 - 5:50 : 4th set-on-the-day Talk
• 5:50 – 6:00 : Clearup
• 6:00 onwards food & drink at the nearby restaurants/pubs

It looks like one of our preset slots might be fixed, so if you’d like to do a preset slot and insure that you have a presentation slot then please do email me.

University

I’ll be starting my masters at the end of September, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m in conversations with a company who is willing to fund my masters project as part of a larger project (sorry, I can’t say more than that).