Ramping up for the next trip ...and studying.

So! Been back in Barcelona for just over a week now. Things have been pretty chill here--focusing mostly on schoolwork, planning the next week of travel. But we still go out on the weekends, of course. ;)

My flights for my next week of travel are officially booked. I leave Friday morning for Paris, Tuesday morning for Interlaken, and Thursday night for Amsterdam. Hostels still aren't booked, and we need to buy a tent for camping in Interlaken. Just got word from a friend that she'll sell me her hiking backpack for 35€, which is awesome. That is going to save me a lot of time and money, since I won't have to go out searching for one. And a new one would probably have been 50€ min. But I really need to get one. I borrowed Zach's duffle bag for the last week of travel, and carrying that thing around between all the train stops and bus stops and hostels got old reallllly fast. Plus we'll be camping out at Interlaken, instead of getting a hostel. We'd rather be spending our money on all the extreme sports they have there.

I am SO excited about Interlaken. I definitely feel that it is going to be the main highlight of this next week of travel, much the same way that Cinque Terre was the highlight of the last trip. Except this time we're spending 3 full days there instead of just 1. For just a general idea of all the sporting and adventure they have at Interlaken, take a glance at this website:
Interlaken--Sport and Adventure

I know the main agenda for some people is skydiving, bungee jumping, and hang gliding. But since I've already done skydiving, and it is the most expensive activity, I might skip it this time. Though the thought of skydiving over the Swiss Alps is kind of enticing, to say the least. Lol.

I think my top three activities will probably bungee jumping, canyoning, and something else... maybe zorbing? How awesome would that be? Being rolled down a hill in a giant ball. And then of course the best part is that you get the title of Zorbanaut. And who wouldn't want to be a Zorbanaut?? So we'll see how that goes.

Applied for another student loan, to cover the cost of the rest of this trip and the fall. And it's going to be worth every penny of interest. Travelling like this has been absolutely amazing. And it sounds like we might get a little bit of time during finals week to travel as well. Our flight leaves on the 22nd, which is a Sunday, and most of our finals should be done by the previous Tuesday. So if that works out then I'm definitely going to Haldstat, and maybe Prague.

It's difficult to get people onboard for Haldstat, cause no one has ever heard of it, but now that a few of them have been to Cinque Terre, I'm pitching it as the other place that came as highly recommended as Cinque Terre. So that's getting their attention. Lol. I think I'll have at least one other person to go with me. Which will be fine.

Schoolwork is going pretty good as well. I'm definitely glad I dropped the User Interface class. Just 9 hours is plenty of work. On Saturday me and my two group mates spent 6 hours each taking pictures of intersections for our corners project in architecture. By the end of the project, the entire class will have photographically documented and then analyzed EVERY chamfered corner in the entire city of Barcelona. Everyone suspects that Sabir (the professor) is then going to use this for further research, either of his own or for his grad students. Which is probably true, but that's still cool. It's actually a project of really impressive scope. And Barcelona is, I think, the only city in the world with this style of cut off corner, so it's significant to architecture people to analyze exactly how that worked out for them. So I mean that's cool. I'm always up for some good research.

And speaking of which--my flight to Vancouver is now booked! Vancouver is where the AAAI conference is being held. Last semester, I had a severe case of right place right time. I happened to be sitting in the lab when one of the phd students went in to tell Charles (my research professor) that he didn't think they were going to be able to finish their research in time for the AAAI deadline. As a sidenote, AAAI is now pretty much THE premier conference on Artificial Intelligence. So he's telling Charles that they need help meeting the deadline, but all the other students in that lab are trying to meet deadlines of their own. And I'm literally sitting right outside of Charles' office. So he goes, "Just get Kenny to help you." Bam. Done. So I sit down with them, talk over what they're doing and what needs to get done, and I end up coding a bunch of the distance metrics for them.

And here's the deal with distance metrics. The AI that they are working on is about generating good stories (for things like video games). The author would create what is called a "story space," which is a web of story plot points. Each plot point can lead you to some number of other plot points, and a path through this space ends up being a story. Imagine it kind of like the choose your own adventure novels. So their technology involves finding a way to get the computer to choose good stories every time, but different stories every time. This way you could play a game, and get a good, but unique story every time you play it. Cool eh?

So my part in this was coding the distance metrics. And what these are, is a way to compare stories. Because stories are a series of plot points (or something analogous), how do you say when two stories are alike? Is it if they have the same ending? Or is it if they have all the same story up until the very end? Or is it something subtler, like how many plot points they have that are the same? So I wrote up a series of different distance metrics, and these were used to analyze in different ways how similar the generated stories were.

AND *drumroll please* the paper got accepted! Not only did it get accepted, but of our three reviewers, one gave us a recommendation for best paper. And we got a poster session. Poster sessions are where you print up a big poster of all your info, then stand beside it while everyone walks around. At this conference they are only given to highly technically difficult papers, or outstanding papers. And we got one!

So now I'm published. Third author on a paper at an AI conference. As an undergrad. Woo woo!

The flight from Vancouver leaves about 3 hours after I land in ATL, so I'll just stay in the airport, keep my luggage and turn right back around and get on a plane. Gonna be a long day of travel, but worth it.

Ok, well class is about to start, so I gotta run. Will post again soon. Always so much to say.

Love you guys!