Surfin’ USA

Spring, finally !

After what in retrospective seemed like the longest winter ever (weeks of snow or rain and cold temperatures in general), it appears spring has finally reached us here in Gothenburg — ‘t was about time! The sun is shining, the snow is melting, birds are chirping and the skirts are getting shorter.
I hope this will give me an additional push for completing my thesis. At the moment I am focusing on obtaining more computational results and written things down in the form of a 15-pages-max research paper, which is then to be submitted to a scientific conference in this area — the submission deadline is April 21st, so I’d better get crackin’.
In addition to that I’ve fixed a date for my thesis presentation, it will be on the morning of Wednesday, April 12th. Luckily I have prepared some slides already, which I just need to extend a little bit.

Zurich pics

As promised, here are some pictures of Zurich, taken when strolling through the Old Town for a short while after visiting the research group at the ETH last week. Quite picturesque, isn’t it?

Zurich

After coming back from Stockholm Wednesday night (it was an interesting workshop, although I didn’t understand some of the things they were talking about ) I needed to get packed pretty quickly, since on Thursday around noon I had to get on my way to Zurich.
I had recently contacted a professor at the Federal Institute of Technology there and asked about a potential PhD position in his group. After some mail exchange and phone conversations he eventually invited me for a personal meeting.
I arrived Thursday night and met a friend from Aachen who is currently doing a practical term in Zurich and with whom I could stay. On Friday I then went to meet the professor, give a little presentation about my Master’s thesis and talk to some other people in the group. The university itself is certainly very good, the people are nice and the ongoing work in the group is very interesting. So it really seems like an option to consider.
I also had some hours to take a brief look at the city, by means of a walk through the city, which I also liked quite much (I might put some pictures up later). The only major problem might be the language: I can’t understand a word of the local German dialect.
Last week I’ve also had another phone interview with Google and am currently waiting to hear back from them — we will see whether that will become an option as well.

For now, however, I am back to bugfixing my program and writing on my thesis paper…

Workshop in Stockholm

This wednesday I will go to Stockholm to attend a scientific workshop about constraint programming (link), a topic I am concerned with in my thesis as well. I have previously been in contact (via email) with some of the people that will attend the workshop, so it should be nice to meet them in person. Also some of the topics presented promise to be quite interesting.
The only drawback is that I’ll have to catch the train here in Gothenburg at 6 in the morning, which is the middle of the night for me.

Why I don’t like Windows

Yesterday the Windows installation on my desktop computer stopped working. Just like that. Thursday night I shut the computer down normally and Friday it would crash upon startup (with the infamous blue screen). And I hadn’t even installed any new program, hardware or similar!
Well, I then booted into Windows’ safe mode and used the system recovery feature which is supposed to revert the operating system to a recent, working state. Instead of doing so (still couldn’t start Windows afterwards) it also killed the safe mode, which will now produce a blue screen upon startup as well. Perfect!
It looks like it will be a rather tedious process to get the computer back up again, probably I’ll have to reinstall Windows completely. Luckily I use my laptop for most of my work — esp. all thesis related things — so this whole thing is not that dramatic. Still it’s a pain in the a** that I have to bother with this stuff now, as I have plenty of other things to take care of already…

Busy days — and more ahead

Seems I haven’t written anything for quite a while now. The reason for that is that I’m really busy with my thesis and several other things on top of that.
Regarding the thesis, I’m making good progress (or so I think ) and have some first very promising results. A few details are still missing, though, and some of those are really tricky to implement properly as well. Moreover I need to start writing things down to produce the actual thesis document — I already have a few pages (well, three ) but there are still a lot more to come…

Apart from that I’m spending quite some time planning my life after graduating here in Sweden. As I’ve written before, I’ve applied to the PhD programs of a few universities in the USA/Canada, and just now the first responses start coming in. I’ve also been in contact with a professor at ETH Zurich who has a vacant position in his group at the moment, with interesting research topics.
As another alternative I’m currently going through a number of phone interviews with Google, who have recently opened up a research/development centre in Zurich and are looking for employees. If they really ended up offering me a job, that would certainly be another viable alternative…
In any case, it will be a tough decision in the end! Right now, however, it’s too early to really tell anything, so stay tuned.