Machine translation

Machine translation is one of the holly grails of artificial intelligence. The first approach to this problem was to construct a set of rules by studying the grammars of the two languages (called symbolic approach), but, as with other problems in AI, statistical tehniques (inferring "rules" from many translations of documents from one langauge to the other) seem to be more succesful now.
Each year NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology in US) organizes a contest of machine translation software. The results for this year shows Google as the front runner. I'm proud to see University of Maryland (where I got my master degree) as a top contestant. I know they have a good research group in this area. Go Terps! :)

Photos from Italy

I posted some pictures from my trip to Italy. They're not the best, you have to remove my face from some of them to obtain a better view :)

I visited Rome plus Naples and its surroundings (Pompeii, Sorento, and the Capri island). A lot of beautifull things to view in both places, and the time was short for seeing and "digesting" everything. So I hope to go back to see more of Italy "in the next future", as a friend of mine would say :)

Sunset over Ischia island, while on the route from Capri to Naples 

Live dog in Pompeii :) 

Cave Canem mosaic in Pompeii 

Overview of Naples with a clouded Vesuvius in the left corner 

Me and the Colosseum in Rome 

Back to work

My vacation is over (pictures will be added later, if ever, as usually :), and I came back to work today, wondering again (as I entered my male only office) why is this imbalance between men and women working in computer science? :) I kinda found an answer today: in countries where math classes are mandatory for longer in secondary and high school, the imbalance seems to be weaker.
Read the details here.
So I should try to persuade the people in charge with our education system to add more math classes in the high-school, regardless of the speciality (in Romania high schools usually specialize in sciences or humanities) of a particular school :)

Open source beer and a vacation

Applying computer science ideas to real life just got a big boost with the new open source beer developed by the students of a Danish university :) A more detailed story here. Am I lagging behind in applying computer science to real life? Did these guys need a vacation, or maybe I'm the one who needs one? I definitely need one, so I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks. That means staying away from any computer as much as possible, so this blog will be on vacation too.

Cheers! :)

Playing Moldovans at Tennis

I started reading a new book, Playing Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks. It's a funny book in which the author describes his "adventures" in the post-communist Republic of Moldavia, the misery and the wonders he finds there. For people from Western Europe or U.S. sometimes it's hard to imagine or believe what's described there, you really have to see it to believe it :)

New book

I finished reading Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination by Helen Fielding (author of Bridget Jones's Diary). It's one of the captivating books that you cannot let down until you finish it. It's not a "deep" book, but now it's summer and living's easy :) Another book of this type I read recently is Da Vinci Code, but Da Vinci Code has a poor style; sometimes it feels the author took large passages from a dictionary and pasted them into the book.

Society of trust

As new incidents happened today in London, we see how important is trust in the human society. We agree somehow to not hurt each other, and to cooperate for achieving goals. For my vacation I went to an office, I gave to the women there a plastic card (my credit card), received back a printed paper (my flight ticket). And I'm pretty sure at the date printed there a plane will be at the point indicated to fly me. This doesn't work if some people decide one day to blow themselfs up in a subway train. So we'll have to isolate these guys, and make sure that nobody comes to the conclusion that blowing himself up to kill others is something to do.
The chemistry of trust looks easy to decode, as described here, but the reality is far more complex.
Too much of what we accomplished relies on our cooperation, and trusting each other, so losing it is not an option.

Smile, you're in the biology lab :) 

In our classroom (I didn't write those formulas :)) 

This is how we looked ten years ago 

It's been 10 years

A week ago we had a reunion to celebrate 10 years since we graduated from high school. It was nice to meet my former classmates, and teachers and chat together about what we did "lately". There should be plenty of photos from that evening (I personally didn't have a camera with me), but only a few are online as yet. I'll post here some.

The Supreme Court

In US the Supreme Court is the highest judicial instance. Its rulings are taken as precedences by lower justices. They often rule over controversial cases, like abortion, and in these rulings there is usually a fight between liberal and conservative justices. Today one of the justices announced she will retire, and this will open a battle between democrats and republicans over the next nomination, which is made by the president and approved by congress. Read more here.

Finally some photos from Toronto, and a new book

It took me some time, but I finally posted a few pictures from Toronto. I still didn't get the pictures I took with the film camera I had with me.

I was somehow lazy on the book reading also, but a few days ago I started reading a new book which I bought in Toronto: Joseph Stiglitz - Globalization and Its Discontents.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel prize laureate in Economy, and in this book he describes his experiences as economic adviser of president Clinton, and his period as senior vicepresident of World Bank. He critisizes the policies IMF and WB had related to globalization, and the developing countries.

Canadian National Tower 

Downtown Toronto, which remembers me of Melbourne, Australia