Ann Arbor

for a change, in the last few weeks i've actually had a number of things i've wanted to blog about--improv, graduating, my new apartment and new roommates--and i'll get to some of them eventually, but at the moment you get to hear a couple words about Ann Arbor, Michigan, because that is where i am, because that is where ACL-2005, the conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, is taking place.

the last thing i thought as my plane lifted off in San Jose was "i should have packed warmer clothes". in that judgment i could not have been wronger. you wouldn't think that "sweltering" was a word designed for use in Michigan (at least, i wouldn't) but in failing to so think you would miss the truth of the matter staggeringly. because it is sweltering. even at night--especially at night, when all you want is to stop sweating long enough to fall asleep. if i am ever again at a conference in Ann Arbor in June, i will foot the extra charge for a room with air conditioning, in a heartbeat. yesterday i camped out in the public library all afternoon, partly for the books, but mostly for the climate control.

and why, you may ask, was i camped out in a library yesterday instead of drinking deep from the font of computational linguistics? the reason is simple enough: it turns out i don't exist. first, i wasn't on the list at the dorm i'm staying in, which apparently is normal enough (and certainly not my fault, for those of you who like to think of me as irresponsibility incarnate) but which resulted in my being accidentally put in a room piled with furniture, with no linens, and with a giant hole in the wall. it was 2am in this time zone by the time i got to my room, and i really didn't feel it was worth waking up the night clerk again, and, considering the climate, linens weren't especially desirable anyhow, so i went ahead and put up with it for the night and got reallocated in the morning.

but, you insist, that still doesn't answer the library question. and that's true, except that as soon as i got done settling the question of my existence at Betsy Barbour Hall, the question was raised all over again at the ACL registration desk. and, for those of you who like to think of me as irresponsibility incarnate, this time it was my fault. seems that amidst all my careful planning for this trip--final paper draft, check; copyright agreement, check; poster printing, check; airline tickets, check; accomodations, check; airport shuttle, check--i somehow neglected to register for the conference. this really only had two consequences: first, i was embarrassed, and second, due to my misunderstanding of the registration process for the saturday tutorials, i had evidently arrived a whole day earlier than was strictly necessary.

but i really wouldn't call the second consequence bad. i had an extra day with a copy of the conference proceedings in my hand, for one thing, which meant i had a day to study up before going to talks with titles like "A Dynamic Bayesian Framework to Model Context and Memory in Edit Distance Learning: An Application to Pronunciation Classification". also, i got an afternoon in the library, during which i read the first half of Colin McGinn's The Making of a Philosopher. and, since we're in the middle of Ann Arbor's summer arts festival, i had an evening of live folk and blues. oh, and don't forget the nap--the nap was crucial. so no, i wouldn't call the extra day a waste by any measure. the foresight of the inept, you might say.

the other thing you should know is that they give you all sorts of goodies at academic conferences. not only did i get my own copy of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference (at 629 pages, nothing to sneeze at) together with the Companion to the Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics--of much greater value, seeing as that's the volume that contains my paper--and its companion CD-ROM. i also got a very nice messenger bag, emblazoned with emblems of geekdom (the sponsors: Google, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, etc.) which may just send my dissolving backpack into obscurity. and that's not all! they also threw in a 64MB USB drive, whatever you call those things. oh, and a good map of downtown Ann Arbor, probably the most immediately valuable thing of the lot. all in all, i'd call that a pretty good haul. they have good refreshments, too.

so yeah, if anybody ever offers to send you to a conference, i say jump at it.

in other news, you've probably heard by now that i've shuffled off Stanford's mortal coil (kind of) and am now living in the eastern wilds of the College Terrace neighborhood. please address all fan mail to:

760 S California Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94306

no phone yet, but let your forebearance be evident to all; the phone is at hand.

and in a related item, this blog and attendant sites will probably also be shuffling off the mortal coil of its Stanford domain pretty soon. i'll let you know where it ends up when that happens. probably wordsnatcher.blogspot.com.

and now i must be off to find out about "Probablistic CFG with Latent Annotations", followed by "Modelling the Substitutability of Discourse Connectives", and more of that ilk for most of the day. it's more fun than you might think--this morning i saw demo videos of a gesture simulator (computer graphics waving their hands), and the Q&A at one of the generation talks was downright heated. tomorrow i'll be presenting at the poster session. stay tuned.

Getting my picture taken

3:00-3:30 pm today was the best half hour of my week. I met a photographer over at Green library to have my picture taken for the financial aid website (they're putting up profiles of some students who receive aid in order to convince people that Stanford is worth giving money to. I'm gonna be a poster child!) The photographer's name was Steve, and he rocked my world.

First off, he's really cool. He's very friendly, asked me my name, about what I study; and he has honest crinkly eyes that say that stuff is important to him. And we had a great chat while he took shots: we talked about how technology has changed the photography business, what kinds of jobs he does (portraits and events, mostly), his past in newspaper photography. We talked about the role of pictures in shaping how we understand events. We talked about the time when he was a low-on-the-totem-pole photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle, when the 1989 earthquake struck, and all the big shot photographers were at the World Series, so he was sent to Santa Cruz to shoot at the epicenter. And I asked him, so after doing the news, do portraits and events seem less momentous?

And he lowered his camera and paused a moment, and he said to me: I am making a record of something that is very important to someone. Last week I took pictures for a professor receiving an endowed chair--and that is a huge thing in some person's, some family's history. These things may not make headlines, but they're momentous for people, and I get to be a part of that.

I want to be like Steve.