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Last friday I passed my qualifying examinations! So now, all I have left is a bunch of paperwork about that and then proposing, writing, and defending the dissertation itself. So, in about a year or so I'll be on the job market. And, much as I despise job hunting, I can't wait!
Since defending the quals I've been spending far too much time playing Persona 3 Portable. I've played P3FES, but P3P adds a female protagonist option which changes a bunch of the social interactions, so I've been playing through that side of things. Other than the heterosexual assumptions about the relationships, I've been loving it. More rpgs should have female protagonists. That's one of the reasons I've always loved FF6. Also a big part of why I found FF13 compelling. (Though, tbh: while Lightning is awesome as a protagonist, Vanille is definitely my favorite character :) And a big part of the powerfulness of Kreia as a character in KotOR2 stems from her interactions with the canonically-female protagonist.
Speaking of women. I've been presenting as female for a couple months now, and since I have no intention of stopping nor hiding that fact, I've decided to move T-Day forward. Basically, for those who haven't already switched over to the right pronouns etc: T-Day is today. I've sent emails to the department heads in order to get them to send out the "official" memo; so if you haven't gotten it yet, that should show up on monday or tuesday.
The next couple months are going to be hectic with paper writing. I'm hoping to get a paper on syntax-based sentiment-analysis using matrix-space semantics into one of the CL conferences with deadlines this March. No Haskell involved in that one, though I'll probably spend a few posts discussing the semantic model, which may be of interest to y'all. I'm also planning on getting the work from my first qual paper published; that paper was about Posta, a functional library for interactive/online/incremental tagging with HMMs. Here I'm planning to target journals rather than conferences, and it'll spread out over a few papers: one on the overall system (which I need to actually push up to Hackage), one on the higher-order anytime n-best extraction algorithm, and one on reformulating HMM algorithms in terms of foldl and scanl (this may be combined with the HO-AnB paper, length permitting). All of these would be targeting the linguistics audience. Using folds and scans is old-hat in functional programming; my particular goal with that paper is exposing linguists to the tools of FP and how they can be used to greatly simplify how we describe our algorithms. Once those are out of the way I might also see about writing up a functional pearl on the smoothing library I presented at AMMCS a few years back.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 06:41 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 06:45 am (UTC)From:Looking forward to Posta releases and papers!
(also, I had only heard of Persona in terms of Persona 4 Arena -- but yow, that's a big ol' video game series)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-03 02:56 am (UTC)From:Though it's a bit more than a "series" at this point. There's the SMT series proper, but then they have spin-off serieses like Persona and DDS. Each of these plays pretty differently, so I could see ppl likeing one of them but not the others. The first I heard of SMT was the original Persona trilogy back when it had no hope of ever making it over here. I'd forgotten about them by the time I started DDS— which is amazingly beautiful (visually, musically, and narratively). Then shortly thereafter P4 and P3FES finally made it over here. Never have played P4A though, you'll have to show me sometime :)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-03 03:07 am (UTC)From:It's got a pretty serious following though.