I don't have much time to blog before Luis gets here, so I'll be brief. Hmmm, no, you know what... it's hard to describe so many little things in a brief manner. I have like 14 minutes before Luis gets here, so I'd better pack up, brush my teeth, try to shave, and go down to the lobby. Finish you laterz...
OK here's the deal: I've now spent 2 days and a half in Pittsburgh, and I would not be surprised, if I decided to write all of it in complete detail, that I came up with a small book. It's been QUITE a ride, and I'm LOVING it.
My last entry left off as I waited for Luis von Ahn to pick me up at the Pittsburgh International Airport. At that time, I was thinking whether to call him yet or not. You see, he got me a ticket from Austin through Dallas that would arrive at Pittsburgh at 6:00, but instead of using that ticket, I bought a ticket from Chicago, since that's where I planned to be the day before my trip to Pittsburgh, and arrived at the airport at 2:00 instead of 6:00, so my plan was to wait 4 hours in the airport and just pretend that I had arrived with the Dallas flight (so as to not make him think I rejected his ticket or anything). But then when I looked at my cellphone and saw 5:10PM, I decided "what the heck, I'll just tell him the truth", and called to tell him I had just arrived. I would then tell him that I really got a flight from Chicago, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But then as I walked around the airport, I saw the passengers coming from the Dallas flight all waiting for their baggage. I wondered "how can this be?". And I checked my cellphone - and then I realized "I'M ON A DIFFERENT TIME ZONE NOW!!", so it actually was 6:10PM instead of 5:10PM, so I had involuntarily called him at the exact time I should've! When he came to pick me up, I already had my baggage with me, of course, but no baggage from the Dallas flight had yet fallen on the conveyor - everyone was still waiting around it. I thought it was funny that Luis didn't realize that it didn't make sense for me to have my baggage if no baggage from Dallas was yet on the conveyor, but of course, he wasn't thinking about that at all.
You know what? Photoblog! Yes, that's what I need! A JPEG is worth 2^10 words, so that saves me quite a lot of typing! OK, next slide please:
So when I saw him I politely greeted him, and he did likewise. We talked a little about the airlines charging extra money for food and baggage on the way out of the airport, where the topic turned into the weather in Pittsburgh being hot, but not as hot as in Austin, TX. He had kind of forgotten where his car was, but when we got to it, I saw the following:
Nice one, huh? Even I could tell this was a really nice car.
So then we went to eat at Pizzaiolo's, of which I do not have a picture of. We ate pizza and we talked about research topics at the CS Ph.D. program at CMU, and then he explained what his purpose of inviting over to CMU was: get me admitted into the CMU CS Ph.D. program. My mind and heart leapt with joy at the sound of this metaphorical, beautiful music. To be honest, I sort of knew he had an intention of the sort - it was the most obvious reason for him inviting me over to Pittsburgh for a couple of days. But I also didn't expect it to be so direct, as in "yeah, I want you to get admitted into the program", especially coming from a professor. I was like WOOOOOOOOOOW. HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!!! Surprise and happiness came onto my face and I thanked him, and then the topic changed to his own current research. But now I was sure - I had a direct support, a very much recognized member of CMU CS faculty honestly encouraging my admittance into the program. If I were a girl I would've cried.
Then we finished eating, and he took me to the Holiday Inn hotel in which I would be staying for these 3 nights (and in whose room 310's bed I now lay face down). There was a particular part of the scenery which I simply MUST describe. Have you heard of Fort Pitt? Well, we crossed that tunnel during the nighttime it was a LONG tunnel. I had never been inside such a long tunnel before. It is a hole punched directly into the mountain - it took about a minute at average driving speed to emerge at the other side. When we did, we emerged at one of the bridges over one of the rivers that cross through Pittsburgh. And then I was blessed with a STUPENDOUS view of downtown Pittsburgh during the nighttime. It is truly impressive. If you EVER visit Pittsburgh, be sure to take that route during the nighttime. Your surprise and awe levels will increase at least three-fold. (Sorry, no pictures. I do have a Youtube link, tho: http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=aTGYTjxrPX4)
And then we drove to the University of Pittsburgh (not CMU), where the hotel was located. As we entered, Luis told me this university was known as a "urban university", where commerces and university buildings were intermixed in the streets. I didn't really understand what that meant until I later walked out and saw a bar, a seven-eleven store, and a clothing store just across from the main university library. But so we reached my hotel, he waited for me to check in, and the lady from the counter told us that the hotel had been recently upgraded, and that the logo behind the counter was a new one - only about 20 Holiday Inn hotels in the whole world displayed that logo:
I thought that was interesting. By that time it was about 9:30PM, and since I had forgotten my camera batteries back in Austin, I decided to go outside, buy some batteries, and explore the surroundings a little.
Just one block away from my hotel was a very great University-of-Pittsburgh plaza. I was kind of lost, just walking around, and when I entered the plaza, I found myself next to a church-like building with a neat classical architecture style (see Disney castle below):
The side door had a sign that said that the church (or Heinz Memorial Chapel, as it said on the sign (http://www.heinzchapel.pitt.edu/) ) closed at 5PM, so I was pretty sure it was closed. I went around the building, admiring all its niceties, and then I reached the front door. Just for kicks, I tried pushing it to see if it opened. It did. Uncertain about whether I was allowed to go inside, I let it close and slowly walked away. It wasn't 10 seconds before a talkative man with a moustache came out of the front door, invited me inside, and offered to tour me around. He turned the lights and WOW! it was the most beautiful church I remembered ever seeing. I don't too much about church decorations, so I can't describe it too well, but the columns, all made of stone in classical style, looked gray-smooth and perfect. The windows were narrow but gigantically tall, and there was also an organ. He started to show me how he could push and pull knobs out of the organ to make certain pipes active, and so, to change the sound ever so slightly to create different effects. I think he was just showing off when he played the Toccata y Fugue with all the organ pipes turned on, but when we were exiting the chapel, a lot of students were standing in the front, saying they were walking around the church and had gotten scared when the dark, empty-looking church began to emit a classic scary, dracula-like tune at full volume. The man also invited THEM into the church, and gave them the whole tour again. I stayed with them and learned that the organ had 4,272 pipes all hidden inside the chapel, and heard him play a couple more songs on the organ. Unfortunately, I had not bought any batteries for my camera at that time, so I did not take any pictures of the chapel's insides. I hope to still have a chance to capture some inside chapel images in the morning (if I wake up early enough).
After the second tour I left, asked the students where could I get some batteries, and they guided me up to the Seven Eleven on Forbes Avenue. So I got the batteries and started taking some pictures:
Statue situated on one of the many university's plazas.
Nice one, huh? Even I could tell this was a really nice car.
So then we went to eat at Pizzaiolo's, of which I do not have a picture of. We ate pizza and we talked about research topics at the CS Ph.D. program at CMU, and then he explained what his purpose of inviting over to CMU was: get me admitted into the CMU CS Ph.D. program. My mind and heart leapt with joy at the sound of this metaphorical, beautiful music. To be honest, I sort of knew he had an intention of the sort - it was the most obvious reason for him inviting me over to Pittsburgh for a couple of days. But I also didn't expect it to be so direct, as in "yeah, I want you to get admitted into the program", especially coming from a professor. I was like WOOOOOOOOOOW. HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!!! Surprise and happiness came onto my face and I thanked him, and then the topic changed to his own current research. But now I was sure - I had a direct support, a very much recognized member of CMU CS faculty honestly encouraging my admittance into the program. If I were a girl I would've cried.
Then we finished eating, and he took me to the Holiday Inn hotel in which I would be staying for these 3 nights (and in whose room 310's bed I now lay face down). There was a particular part of the scenery which I simply MUST describe. Have you heard of Fort Pitt? Well, we crossed that tunnel during the nighttime it was a LONG tunnel. I had never been inside such a long tunnel before. It is a hole punched directly into the mountain - it took about a minute at average driving speed to emerge at the other side. When we did, we emerged at one of the bridges over one of the rivers that cross through Pittsburgh. And then I was blessed with a STUPENDOUS view of downtown Pittsburgh during the nighttime. It is truly impressive. If you EVER visit Pittsburgh, be sure to take that route during the nighttime. Your surprise and awe levels will increase at least three-fold. (Sorry, no pictures. I do have a Youtube link, tho: http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=aTGYTjxrPX4)
And then we drove to the University of Pittsburgh (not CMU), where the hotel was located. As we entered, Luis told me this university was known as a "urban university", where commerces and university buildings were intermixed in the streets. I didn't really understand what that meant until I later walked out and saw a bar, a seven-eleven store, and a clothing store just across from the main university library. But so we reached my hotel, he waited for me to check in, and the lady from the counter told us that the hotel had been recently upgraded, and that the logo behind the counter was a new one - only about 20 Holiday Inn hotels in the whole world displayed that logo:
I thought that was interesting. By that time it was about 9:30PM, and since I had forgotten my camera batteries back in Austin, I decided to go outside, buy some batteries, and explore the surroundings a little.
Just one block away from my hotel was a very great University-of-Pittsburgh plaza. I was kind of lost, just walking around, and when I entered the plaza, I found myself next to a church-like building with a neat classical architecture style (see Disney castle below):
The side door had a sign that said that the church (or Heinz Memorial Chapel, as it said on the sign (http://www.heinzchapel.pitt.edu/) ) closed at 5PM, so I was pretty sure it was closed. I went around the building, admiring all its niceties, and then I reached the front door. Just for kicks, I tried pushing it to see if it opened. It did. Uncertain about whether I was allowed to go inside, I let it close and slowly walked away. It wasn't 10 seconds before a talkative man with a moustache came out of the front door, invited me inside, and offered to tour me around. He turned the lights and WOW! it was the most beautiful church I remembered ever seeing. I don't too much about church decorations, so I can't describe it too well, but the columns, all made of stone in classical style, looked gray-smooth and perfect. The windows were narrow but gigantically tall, and there was also an organ. He started to show me how he could push and pull knobs out of the organ to make certain pipes active, and so, to change the sound ever so slightly to create different effects. I think he was just showing off when he played the Toccata y Fugue with all the organ pipes turned on, but when we were exiting the chapel, a lot of students were standing in the front, saying they were walking around the church and had gotten scared when the dark, empty-looking church began to emit a classic scary, dracula-like tune at full volume. The man also invited THEM into the church, and gave them the whole tour again. I stayed with them and learned that the organ had 4,272 pipes all hidden inside the chapel, and heard him play a couple more songs on the organ. Unfortunately, I had not bought any batteries for my camera at that time, so I did not take any pictures of the chapel's insides. I hope to still have a chance to capture some inside chapel images in the morning (if I wake up early enough).
After the second tour I left, asked the students where could I get some batteries, and they guided me up to the Seven Eleven on Forbes Avenue. So I got the batteries and started taking some pictures:
Statue situated on one of the many university's plazas.
Afterwards, I went on to explore a building that was directly in front of the chapel, about 200m away:
42 stories tall, the Cathedral of Learning is the tallest university tower in the USA, topped worldwide only by a certain tower in St. Petersburg or something
42 stories tall, the Cathedral of Learning is the tallest university tower in the USA, topped worldwide only by a certain tower in St. Petersburg or something
Inside, it was AMAZING. It would just take too much to describe it. Let's just say I felt I was in a Harry Potter story, inside Hogwarts:
The Cathedral of Learning's architecture was amazingly astounding. Excepting the Heinz Memorial Chapel, I had never admired a building's architecture so much.
That night I came back to the hotel, wrote the first two paragraphs of this blog entry, and went to sleep.
Monday, September 1st, 2008:
I amazingly wake up before my 9AM alarm clock sounds. I take a nice warm shower, I take the elevator downstairs, I buy a Yogurt parfait and a hot chocolate at the hotel restaurant, I get called by Luis to be ready when he arrives, I wait for him, I get another call from him, I go outside, I enter his car, and then we drive to the CMU SCS building. The first thing he said about the building was that it was "the UGLIEST building". I looked at it and, yes, it did look very non-ornamental. Its style would more appropriately befit a nuclear bunker. But anyway, we went up through a service-kind-looking flight of stairs, reached his office, and since it was Labor Day and there were very few other people there, we were mostly free to do whatever we wanted to. His office had several peculiar objects, of which I'd like to show a couple:
And there was also this blue, SFX equipped plastic light saber.
We had lunch with one of Luis's Ph.D. students, Severin from Switzerland, and we talked about some of the research he's been doing with GWAP. The rest of the afternoon, until 3:30PM, I just wrote several emails, did some usual web-browsing, etc. Oh, and I also helped Luis create his next assignment for his class, "Science of the Web". Then at 5:30PM we had a BBQ! at one of the faculty member's house, so we left to get ready. We bought dog food, beer, lemons, and soda for the BBQ, picked up a meat thermometer at Luis's place, and then drove to the BBQ.
The BBQ was SO AWESOME!!!!! It's too bad I don't have any pictures of it except for this one:
which doesn't show anything interesting. But I met A LOT of professors. And their girlfriends/wives, too! They were all REALLY nice, some of them very funny, and all of them very talkative. One thing that amazed me a LOT was that I actively participated in a significant part of the conversation! It was because I really felt an opinion about what they were talking. Sometimes they talked about politics and I just kinda listened, but then they talked about statistics, college education, Reddwerks, research projects, food, or funny anecdotes, I could TRULY RELATE!! It was SUCH a good feeling! And we ate this DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS cheesecake and Chocolate Cream Pie. But OMG, I had NEVER tried such a juicy, delicious cheesecake. It's apparently homemade by one of the professors, but he's not giving out the recipe. The point is, it was DELICIOUS.
So the BBQ was a complete success, and then I came back to the hotel and went to sleep. Woke up next morning, bought scrambled eggs and orange juice at the breakfast area, brushed my teeth, was picked up by Luis and Laura in their 1-week-old Honda Civic Hybrid, reached the first IC (Immigration Course) conference of the day (they're like brief abstracts of what each professor is currently doing as their own research, to help the students decide which project would they most like to collaborate in). I sat down and began listening to a professor talk about Software Research, of which most things made sense, although it seemed pretty much like a management course. While I was listening to this conference, Manuel Blum (who had arrived and sat down just next to me) said he would like to speak with me in his office at 2:30PM, just after Ryan's (another professor) IC conference. This was another moment at which both my mind and my heart leapt with joy and excitement. I think my face and voice were pretty successful in accepting his offer through a proper, happy, and positive response. (If all my excitement at that time had been transmitted out unfiltered, I would've caused quite a racket in the classroom.
So then I listened to Anupam's conference, where I learned about http://www.wordle.net, and about how the maximum number of points in N dimensions where all pairs of points have an "approximate" distance of 1 between them increases exponentially with N. And also, that for any problem on N dimensions, this problem can be APPROXIMATED to a calculable factor by reducing the number of dimensions to logN/eps^2, where eps is the factor of "approximation" to which we want the solution to approximate to. He proved this by using some kind of matrix random boolean mapper. I didn't quite understand EVERYTHING, but it was cool.
Then a guy talked about something I don't remember too well. Then another guy talked about some research project he's working on sponsored by DARPA to help military forces on real-time operations and let them be guided by personal assistants instead of communication manually, as with radio.
Then lunchtime came, and Luis, Venkat Guruswami, Anupam, and me went to eat Indian food at one of CMU's "trucks":
I did see some "unusual" stuff on CMU's central plaza area:
Afterwards I went on to some other IC conferences. One of them was about speeding up computer systems through better queuing strategies, and the other was about P and NP-complete problems. It was partly interesting, but not particularly exciting.
Then I walked with Manuel Blum to his office. Oh, we talked a lot. About my family, about my english, about my research interests, about last year's automated-car competition which CMU won, about how MIT's system possessed only two cameras, so its image processing algorithms should be very good too. Then I was telling him about my research interests, and Luis showed up. I showed up at his "Science of the Web" class, he talked about some graph theorems, he showed me as being the "target" everyone in the class is looking for in Facebook (in front of the whole class), and then there was another IC conference - a robotics one. I will only say the name of the project: "Claytronics". I'd like to explain it, but it'd take longer than I want to spend on it, so I won't. It is a very exciting thing to think about and create, but it does seem like a pretty far away idea. Anyway, after the conference we went on and visited Intel:
It was really cool! Afterwards, I got lost, two asian girls helped me get unlost, I went to Luis's office and had nothing else to do, so I went out to the CMU central plaza and started to take a bunch of pictures:
Then we left the office, picked up Ben at his dorm (Ben is the tech lead on Luis's Captcha project), and went to eat at whole foods. The food was really good. We then dropped off Ben at his place and Luis dropped me off at my hotel. I then decided to get some more batteries for my camera because my first pair was already running out. I went out on a picture tour around University of Pittsburgh tonight. See for yourself:
And that brings me back here, laying on my bed with my laptop, writing a larger-than-average blog entry to tell about my experiences and photographs in Pittsburgh, and dropping my eyelids at 4:14AM. I better go to sleep now. All images aren't up yet, but what the heck, it's not being published yet.
And now all images are finally up! Almost a month later, this entry is being published!
The Cathedral of Learning's architecture was amazingly astounding. Excepting the Heinz Memorial Chapel, I had never admired a building's architecture so much.
That night I came back to the hotel, wrote the first two paragraphs of this blog entry, and went to sleep.
Monday, September 1st, 2008:
I amazingly wake up before my 9AM alarm clock sounds. I take a nice warm shower, I take the elevator downstairs, I buy a Yogurt parfait and a hot chocolate at the hotel restaurant, I get called by Luis to be ready when he arrives, I wait for him, I get another call from him, I go outside, I enter his car, and then we drive to the CMU SCS building. The first thing he said about the building was that it was "the UGLIEST building". I looked at it and, yes, it did look very non-ornamental. Its style would more appropriately befit a nuclear bunker. But anyway, we went up through a service-kind-looking flight of stairs, reached his office, and since it was Labor Day and there were very few other people there, we were mostly free to do whatever we wanted to. His office had several peculiar objects, of which I'd like to show a couple:
And there was also this blue, SFX equipped plastic light saber.
We had lunch with one of Luis's Ph.D. students, Severin from Switzerland, and we talked about some of the research he's been doing with GWAP. The rest of the afternoon, until 3:30PM, I just wrote several emails, did some usual web-browsing, etc. Oh, and I also helped Luis create his next assignment for his class, "Science of the Web". Then at 5:30PM we had a BBQ! at one of the faculty member's house, so we left to get ready. We bought dog food, beer, lemons, and soda for the BBQ, picked up a meat thermometer at Luis's place, and then drove to the BBQ.
The BBQ was SO AWESOME!!!!! It's too bad I don't have any pictures of it except for this one:
which doesn't show anything interesting. But I met A LOT of professors. And their girlfriends/wives, too! They were all REALLY nice, some of them very funny, and all of them very talkative. One thing that amazed me a LOT was that I actively participated in a significant part of the conversation! It was because I really felt an opinion about what they were talking. Sometimes they talked about politics and I just kinda listened, but then they talked about statistics, college education, Reddwerks, research projects, food, or funny anecdotes, I could TRULY RELATE!! It was SUCH a good feeling! And we ate this DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS cheesecake and Chocolate Cream Pie. But OMG, I had NEVER tried such a juicy, delicious cheesecake. It's apparently homemade by one of the professors, but he's not giving out the recipe. The point is, it was DELICIOUS.
So the BBQ was a complete success, and then I came back to the hotel and went to sleep. Woke up next morning, bought scrambled eggs and orange juice at the breakfast area, brushed my teeth, was picked up by Luis and Laura in their 1-week-old Honda Civic Hybrid, reached the first IC (Immigration Course) conference of the day (they're like brief abstracts of what each professor is currently doing as their own research, to help the students decide which project would they most like to collaborate in). I sat down and began listening to a professor talk about Software Research, of which most things made sense, although it seemed pretty much like a management course. While I was listening to this conference, Manuel Blum (who had arrived and sat down just next to me) said he would like to speak with me in his office at 2:30PM, just after Ryan's (another professor) IC conference. This was another moment at which both my mind and my heart leapt with joy and excitement. I think my face and voice were pretty successful in accepting his offer through a proper, happy, and positive response. (If all my excitement at that time had been transmitted out unfiltered, I would've caused quite a racket in the classroom.
So then I listened to Anupam's conference, where I learned about http://www.wordle.net, and about how the maximum number of points in N dimensions where all pairs of points have an "approximate" distance of 1 between them increases exponentially with N. And also, that for any problem on N dimensions, this problem can be APPROXIMATED to a calculable factor by reducing the number of dimensions to logN/eps^2, where eps is the factor of "approximation" to which we want the solution to approximate to. He proved this by using some kind of matrix random boolean mapper. I didn't quite understand EVERYTHING, but it was cool.
Then a guy talked about something I don't remember too well. Then another guy talked about some research project he's working on sponsored by DARPA to help military forces on real-time operations and let them be guided by personal assistants instead of communication manually, as with radio.
Then lunchtime came, and Luis, Venkat Guruswami, Anupam, and me went to eat Indian food at one of CMU's "trucks":
I did see some "unusual" stuff on CMU's central plaza area:
Afterwards I went on to some other IC conferences. One of them was about speeding up computer systems through better queuing strategies, and the other was about P and NP-complete problems. It was partly interesting, but not particularly exciting.
Then I walked with Manuel Blum to his office. Oh, we talked a lot. About my family, about my english, about my research interests, about last year's automated-car competition which CMU won, about how MIT's system possessed only two cameras, so its image processing algorithms should be very good too. Then I was telling him about my research interests, and Luis showed up. I showed up at his "Science of the Web" class, he talked about some graph theorems, he showed me as being the "target" everyone in the class is looking for in Facebook (in front of the whole class), and then there was another IC conference - a robotics one. I will only say the name of the project: "Claytronics". I'd like to explain it, but it'd take longer than I want to spend on it, so I won't. It is a very exciting thing to think about and create, but it does seem like a pretty far away idea. Anyway, after the conference we went on and visited Intel:
It was really cool! Afterwards, I got lost, two asian girls helped me get unlost, I went to Luis's office and had nothing else to do, so I went out to the CMU central plaza and started to take a bunch of pictures:
Then we left the office, picked up Ben at his dorm (Ben is the tech lead on Luis's Captcha project), and went to eat at whole foods. The food was really good. We then dropped off Ben at his place and Luis dropped me off at my hotel. I then decided to get some more batteries for my camera because my first pair was already running out. I went out on a picture tour around University of Pittsburgh tonight. See for yourself:
And that brings me back here, laying on my bed with my laptop, writing a larger-than-average blog entry to tell about my experiences and photographs in Pittsburgh, and dropping my eyelids at 4:14AM. I better go to sleep now. All images aren't up yet, but what the heck, it's not being published yet.
And now all images are finally up! Almost a month later, this entry is being published!
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