Blog entries for category "travelling":

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 visit to Hamburg was very brief indeed. The sole purpose of it was to spend some time with my family and that is exactly what I did. Nevertheless, I am very happy that I have still managed to meet some friends one night.

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I did it! Not without some adventures, but I did it!

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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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Finally. I had waited for a very long time to go back to London. All the efforts of the American Airlines staff to screw up my mood did not have a chance to succeed - I was finally there.

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Or Chicago - London

I was excited and full of happy and eager anticipation to get to London once again. But first, it turned out, I was to have some unpleasant adventures.

Before I get to the main story about how American Airlines treat their customers like shit, here is a warning for all travellers from the metric world who want to go to the US and back:

First of all I must say - I really liked Chicago. This was the first place I've seen in the US, about which I thought that I understood why people would want to live there. Like in some European cities like London, I in a real metropolis, with imposing buildings, and busy ado everywhere. Sitting on the train and looking at other passengers I realised that they did not appear any different than in any other of the world's metropolises. I could have been in Moscow, in Paris or in London, and the people would not look much different. I liked it. But first, I had to leave Knoxville...

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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 trip from Atlanta to Knoxville was nice, northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee offer some beautiful nature.

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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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Hey!

most people who do a trip around the world to attend conferences and visit universities spend their free time looking at local sites, going to local museums or just relaxing in the hotel lobby. Sounds kinda boring, init?

This is why instead of all that
I am swimming/cycling/running the London triathlon!

On the 9th of August I will do a 750m swim, a 20km bike ride and a 5km run. The funniest thing is that while most people train before doing this kind of thing, I am travelling, so I spend most of my time attending conferences (i.e. sitting) in the day and, well, ehm.., socialising in a not most healthy way in the night. So I am quite curious how the triathlon will go!

Anyway, here is your part:
Due to late entry I was only able to enter the race through a charity. This means, they give you a place in the event and you agree to raise some money for them in return.
My target is to raise 200 GBP (ca. 450 AU$), so I need your support.

Go to:
http://www.justgiving.com/greg-paperin

I went to Atlanta to take part in GECCO'08, but staying on for 2 days after the end of the conference I had a chance to explore the city. I did not like it. It made the impression of a third world county. Dirty, hot, loud, and so full of beggars that you cannot cross the street without being harassed for money. I have not seen so many homeless people in my life.

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The last few weeks before the departure for my world round rip were quite crazy. As it happens, I tried to do too much in a far too short time. All the idealistic plans about being ready for departure a week before the flight in order to take things easy turned out to be fatuous. Well, I should have expected that. At the end, I barely managed to finish most of this website and to release a new beta version of LiveGraph. The grandiose plans of writing a numerical analysis paper on holey fitness landscapes and starting the Dual Phase Evolution review paper fell sacrifice to the harsh reality and my inability to make realistic time estimates.