Thromigal's Blog

AI will enhance search to create interactive reasoning and analytical systems. Search engines today do not know "why" we want some information and hence cannot reason about it. They also do not interact with us to help with analysis. An AI system that collects information based on knowing why it is needed and then asks more questions to refine its search would be clearly available well before 2030. These "search-thinking-bots" will also write up analyses based on parameters elicited from the conversation, and imbue these analyses with different political (left/right) and linguistic (aggressive/mild) slants, chosen by the human, using advances in language generation, which are already well underway. These "intellectual" agents will become companions, helping us make sense of our information overload. I often collect files of material on my cloud drive that I found interesting or needed to read later, and these agents would be able to summarize and engage me...

Academic life is complicated. It comes with a lot of flexibility and freedom, but also a lot of responsibility. With great flexibility comes huge complexity and variety. Let me explain. A professor has many roles. First, a researcher, working usually on several projects at the same time with many co-authors, usually spread out all over the globe nowadays. Second, teaching, which itself involves many activities, from preparing classes to teaching in class, to setting homework and exams, to meeting students, advising, dealing with co-teachers, scheduling, etc. Third, university service, which includes many activities such as department chair, program head, committees of all type, raising money, and several other time sinks---like P.R., which professors are terrible at---and many other administrative make-work tasks, that have no productive purpose, but which universities excel at perpetuating. Fourth, editorial and referee work, which in itself seems light but is deceptively t...

(by SR)   We set out from San Jose on a Sunday morning, so there was little traffic to contend with. Our ultimate destination was Crater Lake up in Oregon, and we’d already made hotel bookings at various stops along the way, because neither of us had seen that part of the state before. Also, we found that by pre-planning this aspect, we could avoid the impending July 4 th surge!!   Our first stop was Mount Shasta . [Pics: 1 2 ] It was a 300 mile journey at the end of which we stayed at the Best Western Tree House. If you do go to Shasta, we recommend you make a stop for dinner at Lily’s, an organic restaurant down town, which seems pleasantly progressive when you are surrounded in such rustic simplicity!! Also visit Lake Siskiyou  (great circular hike around for 7 miles) and pass through the town of Weed, CA!   The following day we left California and headed to the city of Klamath Falls, which is about another 85 miles north and is in Oregon. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Resort up...

At my business school, students end their MBA curriculum with a Capstone class. This class is intended to "bring it all together" and hence its moniker. It is a special pedagogical experience for student and teacher and one that should not be bypassed. It's always good to consolidate one's knowledge and have the pieces fall in place. Every now and then a student prefers to opt out of this end game experience, preferring the Thesis option that may be taken in lieu of their Capstone class. This is a mistake. Unless a student is highly motivated, knows exactly what he wants to do for a thesis, and has already undertaken at least a hundred hours of exploration of the subject matter of the thesis, it is a plain waste of time. And the opportunity cost is high, because the learning from the Capstone class is priceless. Yes, Capstone is a lot of work, and it is tempting at the end of the long haul towards a graduate degree to want to give oneself a break. But especially in th...

In April this year, the philosophy department at San Jose State University sent a well-reasoned letter to law professor Michael Sandel at Harvard, explaining to him why they did not need his online justice course imposed on their students by the management of the California State System. Being ordered to feed your children someone else's cooking is an affront, to put it mildly. The debate about traditional pedagogical delivery and the new kid on the block -- online education -- is alive, and the SJSU faculty went to battle, against the online upstart, and their administrative overlords. Universities are run by academics (or we professors like to think so), but state systems are run by bureaucrats. Conflict in our education system has been engineered in, sadly. Academics are never paid enough to often realize costs are an issue, and bureaucrats only care about costs. The truth is, the fight over online education is being fought on a battleground of costs. It would be sad if this wer...

Here is a brief extract of comments I made in an interview in Singapore this year.  The first piece of advice I give to PhD students is to not be in a big rush to get the data and do something with it. You have to have a really good question first. Otherwise, no matter how good your data is, your work is not going to be interesting and you will not publish a good paper.  The second thing is, you should always theoretically analyse the question completely first because that exercise will take you to the right empirical specification for the data work that you want to do. There should be a good theory because once you have a theory, then you can derive a setup that tells you that if this assumption holds, then you should see this in the data, etc. “No theory, no paper.”  Another piece of advice is not to be in a big rush to find a topic because you are going to be stuck with it for the duration of the PhD and possibly a few more years. You do not want sub-optimally close on something tha...