Blog entries for category "professional":

I went to Madeira to attend the ICEC'09 conference (International Conference on Evolutionary Computation) where I presented my and Suzanne's work on Dual Phase Evolution. The presentation went extremely well and there were some interesting questions during the following discussion.

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Down in the old town centre lights shimmered busily. The wind mixed the buzz of the city, the hooting of cars, and the occasional laughter and shouting into a jolly babble and carried it up the Castle Hill, across the park, and up to the walls of the palace. Around, a few groups of people, strolling, many with wine glasses, chatting, smiling, enjoyed the warm Indian summer night and the views across the Danube onto the city of Pest. The giant cornice above the tunnel that lead through the Castle Hill and connected Buda's alleys directly to the Chain Bridge shimmered in a magical silver tone created by the fool moon that shined through the trees. The cornice was a traditional meeting place for couples, and on this night several of them sat and stood along the cornice edge and further up between the trees of the castle. Enchanted, I thought that if someone would ever ask me what it was that I missed while living in breathtaking Australia, missed so much that I could hardly imagine settling there, all I needed to do was to bring across a little of this humbling atmosphere that filled everything around. I could not imagine to find anything like that anywhere outside Europe.

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This took me ages to find out, so here is the solution for the benefit of everyone who is having a similar issue:

Problem:

In a local Windows-based network you are trying to connect to a machine (e.g. in order to browse its local file storage). When connecting, it offers you to connect as Guest user only and does not offer you the option to connect as a local user of the target machine (which is what you would normally want).

Solution (in brief):

In your local security settings, find the policy for "Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts" and set it to "Classic – local users authenticate as themselves".

Step by step solution:

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and a Happy New Year 2009!

I wish all my family, my friends and my colleagues around the globe a merry holiday season and a bright, warm and happy New Year 2009!

May you find what you seek! I hope that we see each other in 2009!

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In the past I have worked with many people and organisations on many projects and I am being contacted with job offerings on regular basis. And so one day, must be about a year ago from now, I had an email in my mail box. It caught my attention as instead of praising the job as a unique and great opportunity, as head hunters and sales people often do, it was quite brief and to the point. Another thing that caught my attention was the company it came from. This is how the email started (I blanked out names):

Gregory,

My name is [...] and I am a recruiter at [a known software company]. I recently received your name as someone to consider for technical positions when we come to Australia in two weeks. If you are interested in being considered for a position, we would like to get a better understanding of your background by conducting a mini-interview with you. [...]

This was followed by a few brief questions, some of which were quite technical in nature - again - something you do not usually see in first contact emails.

I was intrigued by this email, and what made me even more curious is that I have never been in contact with that company, I did not know any people working for them, and in fact, I was not a huge fan of their technology. Who would have given them my name?

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The Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems was a big success in general as well as for me personally. While the biggest ALife event to date, the conference was signified by a traditionally very low acceptance rate and a very high paper quality. Presenting my own work as a full conference paper was fantastic, and attending the meeting of the leading ALife researchers in the world was a stimulating and rewarding experience.

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The reason I came to Knoxville was to visit Sergey's Gavrilets lab for theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee. Sergey is one of the leaders in the field and it was a very interesting visit.

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The actual reason for my trip to Atlanta was attending GECCO - the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2008. I have published some work there and thus presented that work in form of 2 posters and a paper presentation at the Graduate Student Workshop. One paper was on protein pattern classifier learning [Paperin, 2008a], the other - a conceptual investigation into using my computational model of Gavrilets' Holey Fitnes Landscapes for preventing premature convergence in evolutionary optimisation algorithms [Paperin, 2008b].

The conference was a brilliant one, everyone I met there liked it a lot.

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