We decided to submit an update of Jeroen’s work on caching for model counters, based on his master thesis work. It was accepted, so last week Jeroen presented our work.
While I was naturally happy to see our work presented, I also very much enjoyed the rest of the program. It has been a while since I’ve seen so many interesting talks in a row. I particularly liked the contributions from Tuukka Korhonen and Lucas Bang.
Jeroen’s slides can be found here, and a recording of his presentation is also available online.
Thanks to the organisers! I am looking forward to attending next year’s edition!
I feel like I just levelled-up as a scientist! Yesterday, the wonderful Daniël Fokkinga graduated with a very nice grade!
He contacted me in 2018, because he was interested in working on a project that I had proposed to help me integrate in the ADA research group, after they had ‘adopted’ me as a PhD student. The plan was to apply the paradigm of Programming by Optimisation (PbO) to an algorithm that my co-authors and I had developed for solving Stochastic Constraint Optimisation problems. Marie Anastacio would be my co-supervisor for this project, which was ultimately overseen by Holger Hoos and Siegfried Nijssen. Thus, I would have an opportunity to get acquainted with PbO, and with Marie and Holger, while at the same time helping a student graduate and do some cool, new science.
And that’s exactly what Daniël did! His work was accepted at the Data Science meets Optimisation workshop held in conjunction with IJCAI 2019 in Macau, and I had the pleasure of seeing him present his work there.
After a successful presentation and defence of his work in November 2019, he had completed all the work that he needed to get his MSc degree in Computer Science. Yesterday, we attended his graduation ceremony, after which we had drinks in the pub opposite of the Academic building in Leiden: Barrera.
I am very proud of my first Master student at @UniLeiden, Daniël Fokkinga (co-supervised by Anna Louise Latour, Marie Anastacio and Siegfried Nijssen), whose official graduation we celebrated today. 7.92 … very well done, Daniël – @ada_research will miss you! pic.twitter.com/qcGCCAJUgR
Since I’m spending this summer at UofT, I had to travel for just under 30 hours to get from Toronto to Macau, where I shared an airbnb with my colleague Marie and our master student Daniël. I arrived around midnight, in a 30-degree humid heat, with a 12-hour jet lag and still a bit flustered by the protests I encountered at Hong Kong airport. While the airbnb wasn’t particularly fancy (we are on a budget, after all) I was grateful for the AC, the cool shower, and the opportunity to check the wheels of my suitcase for crushed cockroach.
After a short night on my part, we walked to the west entrance of The Venetian: the hotel/casino that would host the conference. The Venetian was… an experience. During one of the breaks, I sneaked upstairs to check out the replica of Venice they built on the third floor. It was… an experience. All the stores and all the people made me dizzy, and the building seemed to have been designed by M.C. Escher: no matter where I went, I always ended up at the shops or the casino.
The canals and shops of Venice inside the Venetian in Macau.
I quickly learned that it was better to stay outside. The outside temperature never went below 30 °C, and with the high humidity, hot sun and occasional thunderstorm, most of us were soaked within a minute of leaving the venue. Therefore, we tended to stay inside, checking out the food courts of the adjacent hotels during our lunch breaks.
Palm trees and a fake Eiffel Tower
Upper level: shops. Lower level: casino.
Many locals travel by scooter.
All the kitsch and replicas, as well as the mimes in the Parisian and the singing gondoliers in the Venetian created such a surreal feeling of dreaming in me. A very weird place to go for doing your job as a computer scientist, indeed.
The Data Mining meets Optimisation workshop
The ADA research group sent a delegation of four researchers to IJCAI this year. Aside from Marie, Daniël and me, our professor Holger Hoos also came to Macau, just in time for the Data Mining meets Optimisation workshop at which our group presented no less than two papers!
After Daniël presented his paper (I am so proud!) and Marie presented hers (she has so much authority!) in the morning, Holger gave an invited talk about Cooperative competition: A new way of solving challenging problems in AI and beyond, giving us all food for thought for the reception afterwards. Of course, our mascotte, little Ada, was there to support us. Later, she came with us for a celebratory drink, showing her support for CLAIRE, too.
Little Ada Lovelace, our Lego mother of Computing, supporting the CLAIRE initiative. See how she resembles Leiden University’s Minerva?
My IJCAI highlights
One of my main highlights was getting to see professor Adnan Darwiche talk about his work. Throughout my short career as a PhD student, I kept returning to his work. In particular I have been building on his ideas of knowledge compilation: clever ways of representing solutions to problems that allow us to reason about those problems in a very fast manner. Darwiche inspires me as someone who, even at this stage of his career, still publishes papers all by himself. He is a great example to me, and it was incredible to get the opportunity to attend his talk on Reasoning about the behaviour of AI systems.
I was also very excited to attend talks by so many of the amazing fellow PhD students and postdocs I’ve met over the years: dr. Sebastijan Dumančić presented two papers in the Understanding Intelligence and Human-level AI in the New Machine Learning Era track and received an honorable mention for the EurAI Distinguished Dissertation Award 2018, and Alberto Camacho presented so many papers on Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) in both workshops and main conference, that I frankly lost count. Aside from these presentations, I also attended those of dr. Emir Demirović, Mohit Kumar, prof. dr. Lars Kotthoff and many, many more. All in all, there were so many presentations by these research friends, that they even overlapped, and I had to choose! (And no, I won’t tell you whose talks I did not get to attend 😉 )
This year was the second time that I attended the Women’s Lunch. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but I got the impression that the organisers made a real effort to include the younger generation of female AI researchers in the community. Almost all of the senior women present at the lunch approached me to introduce themselves or to just have a chat.
Finally, of course, there was my own presentation. Unfortunately, I was awarded a time slot at the end of a session at the end of the day at the end of the conference, so the audience wasn’t as alert and attentive as I would’ve hoped. Despite this, they asked some interesting questions and laughed at my jokes, so that was good.
When I think back at how much effort went into this paper, it is hard to believe. I might actually write a blog post about it one day, for I reckon it could be interesting for someone outside academia to get a glimpse of what goes into publishing a bit of research at a conference. For now, the most important thing to say is that I feel very, very fortunate to have worked on this project with two of the most dedicated, smartest, kindest researchers I know: dr. Behrouz Babaki and prof. dr. Siegfried Nijssen.
Time for some R&R
Occasionally, we have a little time for being a tourist. I went to the northern part of Macau on two different evenings, sampling the local food. On another evening we went to visit the fake Eiffel Tower and looked out over all the lights in the city.
Little Ada making a new friend: Pollo.
Visiting the fake Eiffel Tower.
Taipa village at dusk.
Looking out over Old Macau (and in particular the Ruins of St. Paul’s) from the Monte do Forto.
On our last day we went to Macau tower for lunch. It has a rotating restaurant and we very much enjoyed the view, both of the city and of the people bungee-jumping off the tower!
View from Macau Tower.
After lunch we went to see the Guia Lighthouse and Lou Lim Loc garden. Unfortunately all in the pouring rain, but we still enjoyed the views and the turtles. We bought some bubble tea and took a taxi back to the hotel. From there, I took a bus to the ferry to Hong Kong, to continue my travels there.
