Usually a little vague

"The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbook are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn't have much use for the equipment or the jargon."

Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature, 1954.

(i think i'm going to assimilate my quote page into the main blog, because i have a suspicion that the quotes generally get ignored, while the blog is occasionally read--which really gets things entirely backwards (do i have better things to say than lewis or leibniz?). i may eventually do the same with the poems.)

So how's work?

This is the kind of thing I read at work:
"The identity of meta-language and object-language is a quintessential characteristic of natural languages."

That's from Pattabhiraman and Cercone 1990, "Selection: Salience, Relevance and the Coupling between Domain-Level Tasks and Text Planning". In case you were wondering.

Shining Lights

A question I hear a lot these days is, "How's work?" It always leaves me sort of tongue-tied. I mean, work's work, I guess. But here's another stab at an answer.

I worked for around a year, up until last summer, on "surface realization" (which amounts to putting together sentences in natural language). Since I came to Bosch my focus has been officially switched to "user modeling" (which amounts to predicting what a human user knows/prefers/needs/etc.). There's been a lot of culture shock and stuff moving to Bosch, but I think I finally put my finger on why my user modeling research has been (by and large) so slow and unfulfilling, in contrast with my earlier work.

I have no inspiration. I don't mean no inspiration at all, or no inspiration to do research; I have plenty of that. But in my earlier work in surface realization, solid papers were thick on the ground--the kind that get at central issues, decompose the problem effectively, apply well-established techniques, and present meaningful experimental results. I had heroes who had gone before--minor demigods in the academic pantheon, perhaps, but heroes nonetheless: Ratnaparkhi 2000, or Kay 1996, or (a little further afield, but excellent) Klein and Manning 2003. (Note: I never noticed until just now that one of my computational linguistics muses has the exact same name as my improv coach. Crazy.) These are papers that lift your spirits: you see a sense of continuity and building on one another's work--you see a recognition of the underlying structures that unite the topic with the rest of the discipline. Surface realization is a perilous subject in a lot of ways (evaluation is notoriously slippery, for one thing), but there is good inspiring exploration going on.

Not so for user modeling. It's a jungle. The literature abounds with sketchy and semi-apocryphal guidebooks: Fantastick Travels in the New Worlde (with Brilliante and Statistickal Illustrations). Papers tend to present entire systems in their manifold glory, which is nearly useless for gleaning the good ideas from the hacks. It's an isolated territory cut off from the rest of the discipline--it's even unclear which discipline that would be. It's a savage untamed land without corpora, without evaluation metrics--and thus far, without the brilliant lights of inspiration I have sought.

What's interesting, though, is recognizing that this is important to me, and what this says about my adventuresome spirit. Apparently the uncharted wilderness doesn't by itself move me to chart it: I am Sir Stanley, and not Dr. Livingstone. I need those who have gone before. Or maybe that's not the real reason at all. Maybe I need examples of excellence not just to inspire, but to instruct: without them I really don't know what I'm striving toward. I don't know what good user modeling research is until I've seen it.

(Either way, perhaps this is one reason I'm inspired to study philosophy--a subject with a greater cloud of witnesses than almost any other.)

Celebrate Good Times (Come On!)

mailed the last of my application materials. boom.

On Bicycle Grease

Just before Christmas, catastrophe struck. My noble bicycle, my gallant steed, Schwinn the Red, suffered a sudden and bizarre injury, and he's been out of action since then. Thank God I have a sweet roommate; I've been getting to work by Chris's car for the last week and a half--but finally I got less busy, so I could get busy. Today after dim sum with church friends, Timothy dropped me off at The Bike Connection on El Camino, and I picked up a bottle of tri-flow, some handlebar tape, a fresh patch kit, two inner tubes, a new tire, and a front wheel (I mean it when I say "out of action"). And then I spent until after dark wrenching and taping and cleaning and lubing and puttering.

There's a quiet thrill to bicycle repair: going down to the garage (or out to the carport, as it may be), disassembling mechanisms down to the washers, cursing at your tools a little, coming back in and watching the drops of grime splatter off your hands in the sink--and for the rest of the day noticing the uncleanable bit of black under your fingernails, a subtle badge of honor that whispers, "These hands ain't just for keyboards or cell phones or spatulas. These are the hands of a man".

I have an inseverable mental connection between masculinity and grease. My dad's dad was a mechanic, and my dad has always done basically all of the car maintenance at home. I have a fixed image of Dad under the hood with a baseball game on the radio and grease up to his elbows: that's one of those essential things that Dad does. Years ago my brother picked up the baton and started taking care of the family's several dozen bicycles. (Don't ask me why we always seem to have two or three hundred bicycles in the garage. I really don't know.) I was slower on the uptake (Brian beat me to a lot of cool stuff, like backpacking and driving and going to South America. I beat him to some cool stuff, too, though, like being born.) and I still know nothing about cars. But about the time Brian and I did our west coast trip, I too started to pick up the Art and Science of Bicycle Repair. And since then, I too am occasionally covered in grease. I too am a man.

That's what I like to think, anyway. That's why I feel free this evening: besides the fact that my bike now has a nicer front wheel than it knows what to do with (it's aluminum!), and my brakes work, and I'm once again mobile--besides all that, tonight I have a telltale bit of bicycle grease under my fingernails.