Thursday, October 15, 2009

At Carnegie Mellon University

Yesterday I arrived to Pittsburgh. I'm attending the Miscrosoft eScience Workshop (I'll talk about it in a later post). I'm presenting a paper from the Renata project. Microsoft is covering all the expenses of the trip, so I cannot complain.

The conference is hosted by CMU at the Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. A new building that was donated by, guess who..., Bill Gates. The building is nice with an interesting architecture. Is it better than our new "Edificio de Ciencia y Tecnología"? well, from the architecture point of view I don't know, but this building has plenty of space for students and professors. The offices and rooms are really nice and the common spaces are very roomy and comfortable. And, obviously, it cost much more money.

The CMU CS School is one of the most important in the world. It is a full school, not just a Department. In fact, it has a Department of Machine Learning. It has one of the big guns of ML, e.g., Tom Mitchell, Christos Faloutsos, etc.While I write this post, I'm sitting on a desk at the 8th floor where the ML Department is:


The first office in the hall is Tom Mitchell's. ;-)

Any way, it is interesting to be here. Though I'll be busy with the eScience workshop, so I don't think I'll be able to meet anybody.

3 comments:

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  2. Great! Even if you don't meet anybody, I think the place is very inspiring... isn't it?

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  3. Yeah, it is. Actually what I feel being here is that we tend to idealize things when we watch them from far. Being here, what I see is people working at normal desks and normal computers, discussing, writing equations on boards, thinking, basically the same things we do there, the same problems we try to address. There are differences of course, more people, more resources, etc. But I think we have all the potential to perform at the same level.

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