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...