2012 another year of productive insomnia.

2012 has gotten off to an insane start. I moved last fall to a great neighborhood in the District. The area is exceptionally quiet and next to just about everything you could possibly need or want in a neighborhood.

Productive Insomnia

Last fall, I took Stanford's online Machine Learning class by Andrew Ng. The course was, easily, the best mathematics and computer science learning experience I've had in a long time. It's really hard to express what and how Stanford got it right. The use of technology was perfect, the programming assignment grading system was exceptional, and the instruction was a "must-see-to-believe".

The program was so successful, a non-profit has been formed, Coursera. I've already signed up for the follow-on probabilistic graphical models, natural language processing, machine/computer vision, and information theory classes. Quite a bit on the billet for the rest of the year but, it'll be worth the effort.

New Opportunities and New Horizons

After having resigned my military commission to pursue graduate school and other opportunities, fate has placed a great opportunity at my doorstep. I'm following through with one of my long-standing-personal-life-goals.

Last fall, I started up a small company with some friends to pursue a few research-oriented ideas that have been floating around my head the past couple of years. What was once going to be my Master's thesis has become a proposal and an active area of funded research.

There's more to share on that front, but it's a developing situation and I'll wait to say anymore once we've given it time to incubate.