To do list for the rest of this week

PhD related:

• Read through the sections on algorithmic composition again in the Roads book, to follow up on the work I've been doing
• Go back to the Graeme Ritchie paper on evaluating creativity using quantitative methods (+ related papers such as the one by Pease et al from an earlier conference)
  
• Do a search on papers discussing evaluation in creativity
• Do a brain storm on what the boundaries of my PhD are
• Read relevant sections in the following books, then RETURN them: Computers and Creativity, Tree of Knowledge
• Go through Nick's chapter(s) again and actually make some notes this time
  
• Do a brain storm on the story-telling project and what has come out of it
• Read one cheeky little sound synthesis article, just to keep this fresh in my mind as I seem to be making progress here :)
  

Funding related:

• Fill out and send off Hilda Martindale fund form
• Print out forms for Richard Stapley Fund and FfWG
• Get BFWG form and any other app forms I still need to get
  
• Update blog with current applications list
  

Non-PhD related:

• MARKING :( logic programming, advanced tech communications, careers development courses
  
• Fill out presentation marks for program design
  
• RC work
• Arrange flute lesson for potential new pupil - DONE while I'm writing this! :)

Times they are a changin...

It's been a busy few days or so in the land of Anna's PhD.

I've been really worrying about how I'm half way through my study in terms of time and seem to have done barely nothing towards a thesis. After a meeting with my supervisor yesterday which pretty much highlighted that, at first I came away very disheartened with everything and locked myself in the library for a bit. But today after a good gig last night and seeing friends, I feel so much more positive.

I've done some major clearing up things since then:

• Cleared my shelf of most of the library books which I 'perhaps maybe' might get round to reading... what's the point in holding onto books when I don't feel like I've got enough time or brain cells to get through the essential reading?
  
• Called a halt to one of the projects I'm working on, one which relates GOFAI story generation to music generation - I am hitting so many obstacles with it and it's not central enough to my PhD to warrant any more attention. I am going to write up the work I've done and the conclusions I've drawn from doing this work, both as an exercise in academic writing and to document my work so it's not wasted. If there were no dead ends in research then I guess it wouldn't be as much fun?
• Been very honest about exactly what I do and don't want to achieve in my PhD research (why cram a whole lifetime's worth of research into one degree and eventually fail because of the enormity of it all?)
  
• Done some serious thinking about what I want my thesis to contribute - gonna do a bit more brainstorming on this and open my mind up but I want to focus it much more on the thorny problem of evaluating the presence and amount of creativity being demonstrated by a selection of 'creative' computational systems.

Obviously it's really time to get some serious work done now, so I'll finish writing this and clear some things off my to do list. Speaking of which...

A tiny glimmer of funding hope... (TINY TINY TINY)

My second supervisor, Chris Thornton, is putting together a bid for funding for a project into the abstract nature of creativity, looking at the cognitive aspects - what happens (at a high-level, mechanically) when we are creative. If it's successful, I get employed on that - hence some funding! We've just heard that the bid he submitted has been accepted onto a next stage, meaning that we get to 'officially' apply (as opposed to just registering interest, I think, which was the previous stage).

It's so demoralising not having funding, it makes you feel like the whole process of your PhD is just not recognised as a worthwhile thing to do. I think it's worthwhile, or I wouldn't be investing my time and money into it. But I spend so much time seeking out recognition and investment for this work (and doing other work like teaching to get money to live on) when I could just be concentrating on the PhD itself.

In a way I'm very jealous of those who do have funding, but I guess this way I really seek out the value of what I'm doing, which can only be helpful in the long term. Plus I have now got so much experience in tutoring and lecturing, and have become a lot more efficient in managing my time. So there are benefits to everything, I suppose it's just a case of looking for the 'silver lining' around the cloud.

Talking of becoming more efficient with my time, BACK TO THE WORK...>!?!?

How real life invades the best laid plans...

Of course I didn't do everything on my list of things-to-do (from my previous posts). That is what such overly ambitious lists are designed for.

Perhaps this is why I constantly feel like I'm falling behind with my work, because I plan to do too much and then never accomplish it? Or, maybe that's not the case - I just wrote that last sentence and disagreed with it in my head almost straightaway. I know that I plan ridiculous amounts of work, but I guess I see that as more of a way to prompt myself to do more with my time - there is never an end to the to-do list (if there was then how boring would life become!)

What I need to focus on is less procrastination time, more actual work. I really hope this blog isn't linked to procrastination time - currently it isn't but I guess it's another potential distraction.

The most effective thing for me is to plan my time hour by hour, I find - that way I don't drift into no-man's land timewise.

This week is a bit crazy (as always - I love my life!) I'm doing a musical all week. So we're meeting at 5pm in town. With my bus going once an hour, that means I need to leave campus at 4pm. so between 11.40 and 3.40, that gives me 4 hours of work. And I need to:

• sort out funding deadlines.
• read Nick's chapters (got really into one of them then forgot it all)
• read Seda's chapter for her English - this is my housemate who is doing a PhD in theatre studies, she wants a native speaker to look over her language use. I can't possibly imagine doing a PhD in another language other than my native language, I'm in awe of her for this.
• Have a skim read of a linguistics book, to get a bit of background on some topics there.
• Work out a basic application text for the seminar series in interdisciplinary music research that we want to set up in Brighton

I'll print this out, and assign times for it. Then stick to it!!! (possibly)

The rest of this week's work

PhD related:

• Fix the bug I've got in my EmergingVoices music program
• Read one more paper (or just abstracts) and BibTex it
• Apply for workshop with AHRC for applying for a student led initiative fund
• Go through all sources of funding and find out deadlines, update my blog posts with deadlines
  

Non-PhD related

• Marking for the logic course
• Learn charts for a gig on Saturday night
• work for rc
• Give Leon a flute lesson :)
  

Follow up on the week's plan of work I posted a week and a half ago...

Lets see... as of a week and a half later:

* Revive the emergence Java program I wrote at the end of last term - YES
* Add the results of my Music Spin survey into my LISP program and get some music out of it? (probably that won't happen this week...) - NOPE - GOT STUCK
* Do a little reading into cognitive linguistics-type content - particularly to skim through the rest of the Fauconnier and Turner book and to learn about Image schemas - ISH - WENT BACK TO BASICS A BIT ON THIS
* Clear 5 papers from my to-read pile (prob just reading abstracts and updating my Bibtex notes for future) - HAHA NO! JUST 2 PAPERS
* Have a quick read through the chapter of the book my supervisor is writing, see what I think - HAVE STARTED THIS BUT NOT DONE MUCH
* Read Chris's paper (Chris is who I share an office with) - probably too late now to give him feedback on what he's written before the deadline but still would be good to read it - NOPE SORRY CHRIS
* Read 2 articles from the Synth Secrets series - READ ONE LAST WEEK, JUST FINISHED READING ONE NOW
* A bit of Cope reading? - NOPE

Also, non-DPhil related:

* Talk with Chris about the seminars we want to set up - YES - THIS COULD BE QUITE EXCITING... WORKING ON THIS IDEA NOW
* approach more people about setting up communication across departments (that reminds me, should reply to Stefan's email!) - NOT REALLY - ALTHOUGH WE AS A RESEARCH GROUP ARE NOW LISTED ON THE DEPARTMENTAL WEBSITE. HAVE HAD SOME GOOD CORRESPONDENCE WITH STEFAN KOELSCH AND STAV (ONE OF STEFAN'S PHD STUDENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY) BUT NOT YET APPROACHED ANYONE ELSE
* CDEC marking - DONE (PHEW)
* work for rc - DONE LAST WEEKS BUT NOT THIS WEEKS
* Go through and get deadlines for the funding opportunities I've identified (or send off for application forms if necessary) - DAMN REALLY SHOULD DO THIS SOON. RIGHT. GONNA DO IT TOMORROW AFTER I FINISH THE MARKING I'VE GOT TO DO FOR THE LOGIC COURSE

random wanderings in research

I'm not sure I still agree with the point I made in the last post, about how following up random leads is probably just a waste of time.

If research always followed a directed, carefully planned route without any deviations (or wild goose chases) then it could almost be automated - and then what would the point be in having researchers in the first place?

For example, with Owen Holland's talk yesterday, the vast majority of actual implementation seems to have been done by his phd students and research assistants (that was the impression I got from how he presents it, anyway) But without his original ideas and visions, the whole project wouldn't ever have happened.

Perhaps my problem really is that I never seem to follow a directed, carefully planned route in my work, and that I'm struggling to knuckle down to the real implementation work once I've finished devising what I'm going to do (but don't have anyone employed to do that work for me!)

So I'll make sure I make time for the random deviations... but make it the minority of time rather than the majority it seems to take at present.

busy day or not busy day; that is the question

So today I:

• taught for an hour;
  
• did some non-phd related work (prep and rc) (yes I know that means nothing to anyone except me);
  
• faffed for a bit and procrastinated; tried and failed to understand what conceptual blending is (although Sandra might yet again be able to come to my aid with some slides she's done to help her understand it herself);
• swopped my conceptual blending book for a much lighter and easier-to-read introduction to cognitive linguistics (although I haven't opened it yet)
  
• went to a COGS seminar given by Owen Holland (Essex) about conscious robots with internal models that are behaviour-based (not convinced, despite Owen Holland's very entertaining presentation style - seems like he and his team have pretty much just managed to match what he was criticising - a lot of cognising for very little actual result. But I'm quite sympathetic to the concept of using abstractions as he was talking about - I don't _need_to see robots knocking over barriers and he did come up with some fascinating ideas about different levels of abstraction working together and that being some indicator of consciousness)
• printed out (but didn't read) one of the sound synthesis articles

I do seem to have this real problem of either procrastinating, or getting diverted from the real work in hand by some little side idea of mine. Even though I've got two serious programs I'm working on, all I managed to do on those today was to open the Lisp IDE that I use to write one of the programs in. That's fairly pathetic!

As an example, the cognitive linguistics reading I was doing today was following up on a vague theory I've got: taking principles used in cognitive linguistics and making them more abstract so they apply to music, and in theory, a more general level of human creativity (given my very limited knowledge of cognitive linguistics and an interest in the shared processes between language and music creation).

Really I'm stumbling around in the dark a little with this. Instead I should be concentrating on the programs I've been looking forward to writing, or reading some of the more relevant literature surrounding the work that I'm supposed to be focussing on. But I can't let this little niggling interest go just yet.

What I am going to do though, is to skim read the intro-to-cognitive-linguistics book as quickly as I can (literally I don't want to take more than a few hours), then I plan to go to the lectures given on Cognitive Linguistics, so that I can get my overview from there rather than struggling through all the reading in something that might just be a wild goose chase.

There, so at least I'm being honest with what I'm doing in a day and facing up to what I need to do differently... this blog is turning out to be pretty useful for me in getting me more focussed and efficient in my work. Pretty tedious as blogs go, but I don't care - it's my blog and I'll use it best as I can.

But now my head hurts from thinking about robots that are conscious, modelling the world at multiple levels, ignoring the 'binding problem' (how do we go from the eye receiving lightwaves to seeing objects, with properties, that match concepts in our head), acknowledging ambiguity in human systems as we try to model them... enough for one day. Hopefully my brain cells will be more productively engaged tomorrow.

Plans for this week's work

After the unexpected but exciting 'snow day' off yesterday, I now have 4 days ahead officially (and 2 unofficially) to plan work for. If I actually put this plan somewhere public rather than hiding it on the whiteboard behind my desk I might actually stick to it...! So this week I want to:

• Revive the emergence Java program I wrote at the end of last term
• Add the results of my Music Spin survey into my LISP program and get some music out of it? (probably that won't happen this week...)
• Do a little reading into cognitive linguistics-type content - particularly to skim through the rest of the Fauconnier and Turner book and to learn about Image schemas
• Clear 5 papers from my to-read pile (prob just reading abstracts and updating my Bibtex notes for future)
• Have a quick read through the chapter of the book my supervisor is writing, see what I think
• Read Chris's paper (Chris is who I share an office with) - probably too late now to give him feedback on what he's written before the deadline but still would be good to read it
• Read 2 articles from the Synth Secrets series
  
• A bit of Cope reading?

Also, non-DPhil related:

• Talk with Chris about the seminars we want to set up
• approach more people about setting up communication across departments (that reminds me, should reply to Stefan's email!)
• CDEC marking
• work for rc
• Go through and get deadlines for the funding opportunities I've identified (or send off for application forms if necessary)

Phew that should keep me busy. Lets see if putting this online helps me achieve more. I'll print this post off now and stick it up by my desk.