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Category Archives: University

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 7

The “Standing on the shoulders of Giants”-method: “You should mine previous works as Dwarves mined Moria: deeper and deeper.” Tolkien’s advice (from the highly cited previous work “The Lord of the Rings”): “You should be wiser than the Dwarves and know when to stop. You do not want to wake up a Balrog, do you?” [...]

Posted on 17 October 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Summing up

It’s almost midnight. Among the results I achieved today, I can enlist 5 pages of a proof for a very well known theorem, 1 corrected homework (as in “the work of 1 student”), 2 attended classes (for a total of 3 hours and 20 minutes). No jogging, sorry, and I feel guilty and lazy because [...]

Posted on 08 October 2010 † Matteo § English § Misc ‡ Comments (0) °

Ten ways to fail a Ph.D.

Shared by my friend Justin: 10 easy ways to fail a Ph.D. Personally, I know I have some problems with the “learn too much”.Posted from Providence, Rhode Island, United States.

Posted on 01 September 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 6

Probabilistic assumption on enlightenment: “At some point, you’ll get it.” Strong suggestion to beat the almost instantaneous decay of enlightenment: “Write it down. Fast.” Posted from Gothenburg, Västra Götaland, Sweden.

Posted on 24 August 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Some more info about what is a Ph.D.

My fellow Brown Ph.D. student (although he is going to defend pretty soon) Justin Yip shared the following page (not his work): The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.. The Related Links on that page look interesting too. P.S. I strongly suggest this list of productivity tips for grad students, something I should implement myself (pretty [...]

Posted on 09 August 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

A (CS) Graduate School Survival Guide

I read the following essay every once in a while. It’s funny and has a number of good hints: “So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!” a.k.a. “Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later.” Given the (extremely variable) speed at which academic pages disappear, I [...]

Posted on 03 August 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

First Publication!

In the end, it happened: my paper “Mining Top-K Frequent Itemsets Through Progressive Sampling” (written together with Andrea Pietracaprina, Eli Upfal, and Fabio Vandin, you can find it on arXiv) is going to be published! We submitted it to ECML-PKDD 2010 and it got accepted for presentation at the conference and for publication in the [...]

Posted on 05 July 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (1) °

Academic page updated

Since I have some free time in these days, I updated my academic page. Feedback appreciated.

Posted on 05 July 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 5

Hubris’ Prediction (no false negatives known) : The moment your advisor says you did a good job, you will stop doing anything for a week.

Posted on 28 May 2010 † Matteo § English § Nerd ‡ Comments (0) °

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 4

Conjecture of the incremental forgetting: If you don’t keep a lab notebook, you’ll soon forget about everything you think of. If you do keep one, you’ll soon forget to write on it. Comment on the above conjecture: There is widespread belief that the conjecture of the incremental forgetting is true. If you can prove the [...]

Posted on 16 May 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °