jonny goes to england

I’ll post on my birthday since my last update is already too long ago!

Anyway, this is quite an old image/story but it’s still pretty funny, that’s why I’ll post it. In December, I bought myself a new phone (blackberry) and of course immediately forgot my password and the 3 security questions I set on the T-Mobile website. A bit later I was on the hotline with them while they asked me the security questions which I couldn’t remember, however the Indian guy on the other end of the line probably had the answers to the questions on his screen. Since I couldn’t remember them I was given the choice to get them texted to me. I chose that option and this is what I got. Good I did not remember them.

A version of my current paper has been accepted to some small workshop on Quantitative Analysis of Software. I’m going to present my work next month in Grenoble.

So, I was in Cambridge, attending the workshop “Frontiers in Computational Reasoning” at Microsoft Research. Too bad I couldn’t find the battery cable for my camera, so only a few, low quality pictures

It was quite an interesting workshop, as it brought together many researchers who reason about programs in different ways. The most interesting talk (beside the first one from Byron Cook) was the last talk about “On Reasoning and Intelligent Behaviour”. It questioned whether the approach we use these days to make computers “intelligent” is the best way and how its different from what early AI reseachers in the 60ies thought AI going to be. Basically, now a days, all successful applications are using very primitive techniques plus a lot of data. Google can provide you with accurate answers, not because it’s smart, but because it’s backed up by billions of data entries it can run statistics on.
Modern machine translation is able to translate Chinese into English without understanding either of the languages, purely driven by lots of training data and statistics over it. This is however (probably) not how humans reason about their environment. One member of the audience however pointed out that it’s a very naive idea to try to build artificial intelligent after a model of how humans are thought to think. Mostly, because we don’t know ourself how our brains work.

Being at Microsoft Research itself was interesting too. Every participant got his/her (although I counted a total count of 1 woman besides the catering girls, strange!) own wifi login and a complex password with expiry date, that’s how access control should be . I had an ms visitor batch hosted by Tony Hoare, which was nice.

Then I was visiting Cambridge .. and to my surprise, I enjoyed it! Even worse, I realised how very stressful London can be at times. Cambridge was quite peaceful, slow and I can imagine how people can perform well in such an environment. And with five trains an hour to London (50mins) it’s not too far away from Mayhem either.

That’s how it looks like when you go into a sports shop. Certainly not what you would see in a Swiss shop:

On the way home, close to Liverpool street:

So I started going to these live poker tournaments in a nice club below (or rather inside) Southwark Bridge. The first time it went very well, I dropped out at 6t or 7th position from 90 people starting. Too bad that was only one place before they start paying out money! Last time it didn’t go too well, but still learned a lot (especially how NOT to play in such a low-stakes tournament).

In other news, March is quite packed with thing. Mid-march our group organised a workshop with title “Frontiers of Computational Reasoning” at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

End of march, I will get notified if our paper got accepted at CSF. I’m again cautious with looking forward to it, because it’s a really prestigious place and acceptance rate is low.

End end of march our (small) group within our group has another workshop planned, PLID’09 (Programming language interference and dependence), where I will give a talk about my recent research. Perhaps I’ll upload slides of it later on.

I found a nice Engrish food description from the packaging of a Chinese walnut snack. Can not refuse to put this up here:

The back is also somewhat amusing:

I was invigilating midterm exams again ..

Desk at my temporary office:

A list of things

• The street our university is on (Mile End Road, Whitechapel Road) will probably get renamed due to the Olympics 2012. Names in question are “Olympic Boulevard” or “High Street 2012″. That’s awesome .. who wouldn’t want to have his address at the Olympic Boulevard?
• On Friday, we submitted a paper titled “Lattice of Information and Quantitative Information Flow” to the Computer Security Foundations (CSF) conference. A very good conference .. we’ll see what happens. In the paper, we explored the connection between quantitative and qualitative research in the area of language-based security. It’s very elegant .. but then again I’m not sure if it’s enough for CSF.
• I changed the look of my university webpage. I will structure it a bit better later and perhaps add a bit more content..
• A lot of other stuff I forgot! I got to get used to blogging regularly again!

So just when I moved in last week .. I was told by my new housemate that he has to leave England for job reasons next month! I was quite shocked because it took me so long to find this place and I just unpacked all my stuff. Basically I had the choice between taking up the lease of the house (which is too expensive) or finding a new place! That was last Tuesday. Luckily, I found a new place, perhaps an even better one, on the same day. Also the new place is just 5 minutes walk from where I live now ..

This means I’ll be moving twice this month .. next time in two weeks

In other news, my co worker has been accepted to the AsiaCCS 2009 conference which is in Australia. Let’s see if I’ll end up again spending a weekend in Australia

I’m already in my second year phd now! That’s quite scary. Anyway, I’ll have my first year review viva next Tuesday. I had to produce a report and I’m preparing slides now. The report basically only consists of my two (yet unpublished) papers and some introduction .. The slides will be about my recent paper about valuations on lattices for quantifying information leakage.

Das Gym ist nun endlich fertig und seit einigen Wochen in Betrieb. Ziemlich gross und modern fuer eine Uni. Das beste ist, dass es nicht sehr viel Betrieb hat, speziell an Wochenenden. Praktisch ein privates Gym

Mal wieder einen Eintrag auf Deutsch. Es ist erstaunlich wie schnell es hier von “Sommer” zu Herbst wechselt.

Das Semester hat wieder begonnen. Die neuen Masterstudenten sind hier; schon das zweite Jahr nach mir!
Letzte Woche hab ich ein Paper fuer Fossacs09 abgeschickt. Spannend was die Reviewers davon halten werden . Ich werde jedoch erst im Dezember feedback erhalten.