Happy 2011!

2010 was a great year for me, in professional terms. Mainly, I achieved two important goals for my career:

1. In April, I read my thesis, and therefore I got my PhD.
2. In September, I started a new job as a postdoc at the Computer Science Department in the Royal Holloway, University of London, under the supervission of Dr. Alberto Paccanaro.

On the other hand, I released my first contribution to the free software community, DauroLab, a Java library for doing Large Scale Machine Learning (still not very mature). I plan to improve it monthly during this new year, with clear and concise objectives.

Besides, in my new research group, I started working in bioinformatics. This is a new research area for me, plenty of promising and exciting problems, and though I am still learning a lot the basics of this field of science, I will surely publish some paper on it very soon.

Also, 2010 was a great year for many other reasons. But indeed, the most important one is the people I met during it. Thank you everybody for your support, for your trust, and for being there in the not-so-good moments.

Got a Postdoc!

Sorry for not updating since so long. Anyway I got some exciting news!

Since September 1 I am a postdoctoral research assistant at the Computational Biology group of the Computer Science Department of the Royal Holloway, University of London, under the supervision of Alberto Paccanaro. Although it might sound really "biologic", the group searches for solutions to biological problems using machine-learning based models. So, in the end, it is machine learning applied to something (biology, in this case).

The position is  for 1.5 years (till the end of February, 2012), and it is not renewable. For me it is a great opportunity to start in the world of Computational Biology, in a high-level group. Also, I would like to keep studying Machine Learning, and trying to develop some work in a more "pure" and "formal" line (but this is not a real priority).

The University seems to have a really nice working atmosphere, and all my colleagues are fantastic. Also, the department is small, but counts with great figures in Computer Science (Vladimir Vapnik since his retirement this year, Alexey Chervonenkis or Glenn Shafer, among others). Also, the fact that is not situated in the center of London makes the campus a quiet and peaceful zone (perfect for thinking and working).

I think it is going to be one of the most important periods of my research career (and probably my life).

Manuscript of the thesis

I have uploaded the manuscript (and the slides) of my thesis (entitled Document Classification Models Based on Bayesian Networks) in the "publications" section of my webpage (so, if you want to have a look at it, you can). All comments will be welcomed.

PhD Defended

Defending the Thesis
Originally uploaded by AlfonsoERomero

At last! Also, with a "cum laude" (maximum mark) as the result. Now, it is time to look for a postdoc.

Looking for a postdoc

On April 20 27* I will defend my PhD thesis entitled "Document Classification Models based on Bayesian Networks". It has been a long way, and if everything runs normally, I will be a doctor by the end of this month.

In order to improve and open my scientific interests, I have decided to go for a postdoc in Europe. My current research interests are Document Classification, Information Retrieval and Bayesian networks. Anyway, I am interested in all approaches and applications in Machine Learning (not neccesarily documents), but in fact I am opened to any research topic containing a strong theoretical support.

I have a degree (Ingeniería, like BEng + MSc) in Computer Science, and (will have) a PhD in Computer Science, and I think I have a decent list of publications (here are some of them).

So, if you hear of some interesting offer (or if you maybe can give me one), I will be grateful to listen to it. My email: alfonsoeromero (AT) gmail (DOT) com.

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* Finally, I had some problems due to the famous volcano, and the defense was on April 27.

Today it is a good day to start learning Python

I just was trying to solve a problem of my brother, and I found Python really exciting. Of course, it doesn't seem to be as good as Perl for regular expressions, but instead, seems that modularization is very clean, and it also has a very large set of libraries.

Of course, I am not planning moving into Python, but I will keep an eye opened for that language. It could be a nice choice when building a fast prototype :).

Liblinear is amazingly fast!

I decided to give up using LibSVM for the linear case because it was not optimized for that. Then, I had a look at liblinear, developed on the same team than LivSVM. Liblinear is recommended for document classification because it removes lots of unuseful operations for the linear case. It has also a (very recent) port to Java, which is located here.

Now, working with 50 categories and 0.5GB of data takes only less than 10 seconds on a Core 2 Duo 2GHz laptop. Those timings are impressive! The interface for this library is very similar to the LibSVM one, so it is very easy to migrate from one library to other. Of course, if you made a good design, all you have to do is to update/change your corresponding facade class.

BTW: Happy new year!