Have been waiting this day for several weeks now since I received invitation to Computer Science 2008 conference hold at Cambridge Homerton college.
To get UK research fund for international student become rather difficult. Unfortunately, I’m in this hassle right now together with this economic down time.
So finally I’m off there for three days. Hoping to get some answers, ideas and help.
The conference was mainly about giving insight view of computer science research. For those who are looking for a research career, we were taught a few tips. Some conference seminars are absolutely fabulous!
Why comics is important in research?
The seminar I enjoyed most was “The Power of Procrastination” given by Jorge Cham. He earned PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and turned out to be a comic producer. He’s the creator of Piled Higher & Deeper (PHD Comics). The comics is based on some stories/conversation between graduate students and PhD students. It makes people laugh in the case that some scene are happening in student life. Go to the PhD comics website, check out those archived comics.
Microsoft Research
One of the MS research branch is located in Cambridge, of course they presented and demoed some latest high tech(facial detection). They have more information on their Research website.
Google Research
This was a fun part. Actually, Google doesn’t have a specialized research branch, so, why they presented and sponsored the conference? One of the presenter, a Google engineer manager, said that their engineers do both engineering and research work at the same time. For example, their production server disk format is developed by their engineer to handle large a mount to search requests and caching, even operating system is specialized designed for super large amount of requests. There is a wide list of unresolved issues to research on. So actually, even in this layoffs season(see yahoo action), it’s pretty amazing Google still have spares to hire more people, of course they have to be top notch.
Leave a comment