Continuing Adventures at MIT

Oops, I kind of forgot I had a blog. A lot has happened in the past semester and a half....

I'm living up in Davis Square at Sluglabs with Femtomatt, Jake, and (last semester) Ben. I have a nice little room, it's only ~20min. on the Red Line to campus, and Davis Square is pretty nice - there are some good places to eat nearby.

Also I've been TAing! Last semester I was a TA for 6.034, I was a lab assistant for 6.189 over IAP with Reid and Jackie (it was an intro Python programming course during IAP for mostly freshmen), and this semester I am TAing 6.004. it's been fun/interesting/educational, especially trying to teach intro programming because it forced me to think about how to explain many of the concepts that I take for granted as a course 6 person, to people who had never seen them before.

6.034 and 6.004 are pretty different classes to TA. For 6.034 I only had to prepare one lesson per week, and I didn't have office hours, so I'd mostly answer questions by email. For 6.004, we have two lessons to prepare each week, but they're pretty well-defined from previous semesters (i.e. the tutorial problems that are the same each year). We also have to staff lab hours (8 per week) which seemed like a lot in the beginning, but mostly they've been pretty quiet (I anticipate this will change once the Beta assignment goes out!) and also it means that students bring their questions to lab instead of sending a lot of emails, so it all kind of evens out. It's also been really fun to basically take these two classes over again - Winston's lectures are still awesome, and it's really good to review 6.004 stuff as well since it's not really my area of exprtise, but it's definitely stuff that every course 6 person should know.

Last semester I took Machine Learning with just about all of East Campus. Over IAP I had an enlightening meeting with Anne Hunter where we determined that if I switched to the "new" M.Eng. curriculum, that I could be completely done with classes right then. This was great news because it's meant that I've had more time to work on my thesis this semester. However, I thought it would just be too weird to be at MIT and not take any classes at all, so I am taking 6.345 (Automatic
Speech Recognition) as a listener, and the lectures for that have all been really great so far.

Speaking of my thesis, it's going alright at the moment, and it looks like I just might have a chance of finishing it this semester if I keep up the momentum I have on it. I'm working with Boris and Sue at Infolab on a question answering system
(http://start.csail.mit.edu) and my project is to make the system able to detect and correct the kinds of errors that happen when the webpages we rely on for our answers change their format.

I've also been trying to figure out what I will do next year! Back in the fall, I got a full-time offer from Google in NYC, and I also applied to grad schools. I've visited Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins already, and I'll visit Columbia in April. I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet (I want to visit all of the schools before I decide), but I know I really like this speech and language stuff, so most likely it will be grad school. I'm a bit sad to be leaving MIT, but after five years here, I definitley feel like it would be good to spend some time somewhere else - yay for new places!