Yesterday morning was presentation time. Everybody is required to give a seven minutes’ thesis proposal whoever you are. I was impressed by their presentations. I knew lots of details about their research. Hanna talked about social network analysis using topic model. She made good slides. She started with open source software. I was lost at first. Finally I understood that she applied topic model to analyzing the community of open source software. That morning was like a conference but informal.
I remembered my talk with one of the girls in my lab. We shared a bedroom. We talked a lot. She was from India. It is easy for us to understand each other. I think Chinese are close to Indian people. We have something in common about education life. In Indian the train was the same crazy as in China. That evening Pallika (the Indian girl) told me about her love story. Her fiancée committed to her a lot. They are from different communities in Indian. It is difficult for them to become husband and wife. Pallika’s parents want to find a guy from Stanford Berkeley or MIT. But her fiancée did not like techniques. He studied market. They had nothing in common. But they were together. Her fiancée did not give up for their long years’ relationship. I want to find that guy in my life. She also told me something about research doing internship. She liked cooking. She had lots of friends. She asked me to enjoy being single. Yes. I should take full advantage of the time of being single do everything just for myself not for anybody else. However I hope I can meet my Mr. Right some time. Life is challenging. Sometimes we need someone to support us to spend time with us so that we can go on. We can survive the hard time especially as a PhD student. Life is not only about work. Life involves many things. Enjoy life!
We played games. Yesterday evening we played a game that impressed me a lot. The game includes two phases. First we collect questions and pick up the most interesting ones. Secondly we pick up one question and everybody is asked to write the answer. We collect the answers and read them one by one. For each answer we guess who gave it. It was like the game that I played once in my undergraduate school. That was a discussion organized by my teacher who studied educational psychology. She wrote some questions and asked us to answer them. So only the first phase is different. Yesterday evening we had lots of interesting questions. One was: whose paper do you want to screw up? It was interesting. Some guys answered Michael Collins Ben Taskar Michael Jordan. I did not have a good answer for this one. I just picked up my machine learning teacher who is famous in machine learning area. Another problem is more interesting. The question is “who do you want to ask and what questions do you want to ask”. Everybody thinks this question is tough. I got an answer quickly. I answered: “David Blei what’s your next paper?”. Another question also impressed me a lot. “If you are not a computer scientist what would you do?” My answer is a writer. Somebody wants to become an architect. That was Andrew. Some guy wants to become artist. I did not remember all the answers. Anyway they are interesting. One question asked about the farthest points that you have been to the north south east and west. People went to lots of places. After this game we understood each other better. I love this game.
Yesterday evening before the game we went to a restaurant to have dinner. We had three cars twelve people. I was lucky. We were the earliest. Other two cars followed the GPS. They almost got lost. It took them around one hour to get to the restaurant. It only took us about ten minutes. At dinner we talked a lot about family. I told them about my brother sister and my parents. Andrew has two sons six and nine years old. One of them is learning Chinese or both? I am not sure. He told me stories about the party several years ago. Wei Li a girl I thought who is a boy danced. It impressed everybody. I heard lots of stories about Wei Li. I want to write her a letter. I heard that she tried a lot to get a good thesis proposal. We also had cooking party some time ago. Pallika is good at cooking. She is from India. She taught everybody how to cook on that party. They followed her instructions. We also talked about Chinese dialects Chinese opera (I could not find an appropriate word).
On Friday evening we played a game called two truth one lie. Everybody should tell three stories. Among them two are real and one is fake. I remembered it was like a CCTV program sometime ago. I also like this game. Through this game we knew more crazy stories about each other.
I thought we were going out for sailing on the lake. I will write more after I come back.
This morning I went to drive a boat or a canoe on the lake. I thought I need a strong arm. It took me lots of efforts. I tried to reach the other side of the lake. I gave up. Too tired. When I drove back the wind helped me a lot. Some guys are learning how to dive. I thought they are just starting. I expected to see something special. But I did not see anything special. The equipment is too heavy I think. But one girl was trying. Today it was not raining. We had some sunshine. Great! I could sit down on the canoe comfortably and do nothing. I just enjoyed the beautiful views.
This retreat I was responsible for lunch with three other boys. I did not like the pans. They were flat. It was difficult for me to cook some vegetable. I got the eggs fried. However they turned to be dark. The potatoes were not as delicious as what I cooked in my apartment. It was really a pity.
I think we are going home soon. We are packing up our things. Some guys are tidying up all the cookware glasses knives forks and so on. Retreat is a good idea. We are just like a family. We cook ourselves serve ourselves. Nobody will disturb us. The host has got a good idea. He just rented his house. We use some equipment in the house and we clean it. Next time other customers can rent the house again. The host is not needed to come to the house. A good idea. In future if I have a house near a lake I can rent in this way.
Maybe I was not articulating in a chronicle order. I picked up the most impressed stories. If I were not a computer scientist I would like to be a writer. These are all my writing materials.
