It is not okay for people to break.

This past saturday a good friend of mine died of unknown causes. His girlfriend found him lying in bed, dead several hours. I have numbly avoided facing this so far - instead I've been throwing myself in a dazed and fevered way into research on biological neural nets.

It's comforting, in a very empty way, to reduce people down to machines. That makes it okay for them to break.

Literature Search Update

So going into undergrad, I (surprise) had no idea what it was I wanted to do with my life. My alma mater, therefore, was not the most prestegious of computer science schools. This was driven home to me over the weekend when I found out they had only one year of the proceedings of one neural network conference in their stacks. That year? 1992.

And since I can't check books out of the DC Consortium system as an alumnus, it looks like I'm going to be spending a lot of time reading in the libraries of GMU and UMD. Furthermore, when I say a lot of time, I mean a _lot_ of time. Assuming the 1992 IJCNN proceedings are representative, then I have an estimated 20,000 pages of very dense literature to search in order to cover the last five years of neural net and major general AI conferences.

A lot of that will get tossed out after a brief glance at the table of contents, but even if I throw out 9 out of every 10 published papers as not what I'm looking for, I will be reading a more over the coming months than I may ever have before.

And I can't wait.

Initialization

So I spent two hours talking with the department head of computer science at my undergrad school, and the end result is that I know I'm going to go get a PhD.

I don't know where just yet, but I have a plan for finding out where would fit me best. It involves as its first step 3 months of literature search to determine which school has professors who publish in the areas of AI and neural networks that interest me the most. Even the literature search really excites me, which is probably weird, but a friend of mine told me recently that getting a doctorate is really a pretty weird thing to do anyway.

After helping with that plan, he gave me a lot of suggestions on how to get into the places I want to go, how to make contacts, lists of people he knows, the way some other students have made it into schools that they normally wouldn't be admitted to by working as lab assistants and other things...basically he laid it all out in a way that makes it seem possible - even for a guy who left undergrad never expecting to go back into academia and has been working in the corporate world for the past 4 years. And that possibility made me realize that I really want to do this. The research, the late nights working with other people as obsessive as I am, the 75-80% pay cut I'd be taking, all of it.

Coincidentally, for the first time ever I feel as though I have something truly worth blogging. This is a new thing, something I've never done before. It'll be long and hard and probably entirely different from what I expect. So I started this blog, and now I'm off to my old college library to start pulling all the proceedings of AAAI, IJCAI, IJCNN, ICANN, and ESANN I can find.