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Category Archives: University

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) °

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 3

1st year conjecture on the relevance of research: The relevance of your research will become evident to you only after you got scooped.

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

Elements of Ph.D., Volume 2

Lemma of the Choice for Grad Students: If you wake up late, your morning will either be very productive or a total waste of time, each with probability 0.5.

Posted on 04 May 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Elements of Ph.D.

3rd axiom of the grad student: If you don’t sleep at night, you can get a lot of work done.

Posted on 29 April 2010 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (1) °

Imparare e/o pensare

Nelle ultime due settimane ho studiato molto. Credo di aver letto circa una quarantina di lavori pubblicati a conferenze o su giornali, e quattro/cinque capitoli di quattro/cinque libri. Ho imparato molti concetti di statistica, di machine learning, di probabilita’, di database. Tutto questo è strettamente collegato alla mia ricerca, quindi sono stato molto contento di [...]

Posted on 26 April 2010 † Matteo § Italiano ‡ Comments (5) °

What field am I in?

Is it still considered theory if all papers (but one, which is a book on sequential methods in statistics) you cite appeared in database conferences? Does that one citation save you? =)

Posted on 14 April 2010 † Matteo § English § Misc ‡ Comments (0) °

Writing a thesis

…takes time, is stressing, is hard, is fun. I’m defending on July 13th. =)

Posted on 20 June 2009 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (0) °

Productivity measure

I don’t know whether the same goes for other grad students / scholars involved into theory, but it looks like my level of productivity can be measured by the amount of bloc notes sheets I throw in the recycle bin at the end of the day. Most probably, if you are really good, you don’t [...]

Posted on 25 March 2009 † Matteo § English ‡ Comments (3) °

Capita a volte…

…che i sogni si realizzino. Oggi, uno dei miei sogni si è realizzato. Un sogno che è nato nove anni fa e ha avuto bisogno della realizzazione di molti sogni intermedi prima di arrivare a fioritura. Stasera, una busta dal colore giallo istituzionale mi ha accolto di fronte alla porta di casa. Conteneva una lettera [...]

Posted on 20 February 2009 † Matteo § Italiano § Personal ‡ Comments (23) °