School's up!

that's right! Classes will start this Thursday. Behind us is now week zero: the orientation week for new students. I've volunteered in the International Center to welcome Exchange Abroad Program (EAP) students, visiting Scholars, or simply new international students, as I was last year. It was nice to see myself in those scary new faces :)

(me at the office, carrying my lunch)

I've talked with my adviser and we've agreed that there are two good courses for me this quarter: Statistical Learning II and Parameter Estimation. Again, the Fall quarter seems to be always the most interesting one in terms of courses taught in my area. The latter was one that I was actually enrolled last year, but that I have postponed so that I could prepare better (taking a pre-requisite undergrad course: Introduction to Linear and Non-Linear Optimization). Although taking courses is always interesting - undoubtedly one learns a lot - it is also very time consuming. And my primary objective for this academic year is to have some scientific article published in a relevant journal and/or conference proceedings: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) or Internation Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). I need to check the deadlines for submission on those. For CVPR it's going to be virtually impossible, since the deadline is somewhere in November...

Surfin' USA

Again I have to apologize... I've not been kind to my friendly followers. But I can assure you that I've been putting to good use the time that I'm not posting news! I took the generous offer of my roommate (6f.10'' South Coast surfboard) with a couple of lessons from a more experienced friend in the art of surfing (thank you Tilman!) and "surf's up dudes!". "Awesome" people would say around here :)



I have to tell you that the (really) good weather started one or two weeks ago. In such a way that I was getting up around 6am just because of the heat. So instead of finding new ways to overcome the heat and have some more sleep; I just started going to bed earlier than usual and, like any good Californian, wake up around 6am. I grab my surfboard and hit the water before hitting the books!
Water has been crystal clear, especially during the early morning when there's not that many people in there. I can see stingrays swimming below me, and a friendly seal shows up every morning! The temperature is around some very nice 23º celsius. Which makes it all even more pleasant!


I'm still surprised with the amount of "grannies" and "grandpas" that you see in the water here in La Jolla. You look at them and you can't stop thinking: these folks can barely walk, how on earth are they gonna stand on a surfboard? Then they go into the water and show you some tricks... Awesome!