Seminars and semester

I'm in two seminars now, which I intend to use for blog fodder. We'll see how long that lasts, since I obviously have bursty blogging habits. The first seminar is Statistical Models and Methods for Networks, taught by Steve Fienberg, and the second is Analysis of Social Media, led by William Cohen and Natalie Glance (of Google Pittsburgh). Both seem very promising, as the syllibi list a number of papers that are in my embarrassingly large "should read but haven't gotten around to" pile. Plus, since grades are based on class participation (and perhaps a one-hour presentation), they should be low-stress, compared to other courses I've taken.

This semester Christos and I will be putting together a tutorial on graph mining for ICWSM 2008. (We're currently putting together the abstract/bios, so the actual tutorial page will be up soon!) I also have a number of research projects going on, including putting together a paper from my summer work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, actually looking toward a thesis topic, and getting some new datasets. In my spare time I'm compiling into social-network-form election campaign donation data, as my good deed to the machine learning community (and out of personal curiousity). As of now I just need to get it into MATLAB readable format and get about half a gig of webspace so I can post the compressed files. Also this semester I will be continuing my involvement in Dec/5, helping run the first few TG's as the torch is passed to new members.