March is highlighted by chance opportunities and my ability to capitalize on them, while managing my regular commitments. I love the challenge of seizing up a short-lived opportunity, and creating the foundation of future work. Doing this requires a certainly level of comfort with putting different hats on, which is what a good generalist is able to do effectively. My mind has gotten into a groove that’s very much like the sweet spot every car engine has when it reaches a certain speed: maximum speed with the highest level of efficiency. It does require regular maintenance, like getting enough sleep, taking breaks away from work, and trusting your own ability to work ‘smarter’, not just ‘harder’.

At my KMDI talk, I met the co-founder of a tech start-up that deals with music and computation. My area of expertise is a little ‘softer’compared to the technical know-how they have. I am interested in the flow of information from the ‘front’end (interface design, visual communication, visual flow, etc) and the structure of information and knowledge for the user (information architecture, knowledge classification, etc.). Ultimately, we deal with the same ‘stuff’, just different objectives that compliment each other. Knowing how small the community dealing with technological research specific to the music domain is, it was a pleasure to learn that they are based in the city.

In other news, the On-Demand Book Service (ODBS) got a huge injection of money to move some of the current projects forward. The catch? We need to spend all of it before March 31st. The last 2 months Nadia’s class has worked towards a theoretical public event that would raise awareness of the library and information access issues related to First Nations (It is a rich area for research and development of real life solutions), as well as the ODBS project itself. A lot of the system design and facilitation experience I got from the project last year is in demand to make the event happen. Knowing that we have a healthy budget to work with, we can start materializing some of our ideas in a pilot event and community-based initiatives up North, which is very exciting for me.

Earlier this month (literally a couple of days ago), there was an interesting meeting of minds organized by my friend Vivian, who’s a computational linguist working at a speech facilitation lab in Bloorview Hospital under the supervision of Fraser Shein. He was actually a potential speaker for the KMDI event I’m organizing, but couldn’t make it due to schedule conflict. He was in attendance at the get together as well, but was at the ‘other’end of the table whom I didn’t get to connect with. The start-up contact came along, and there was some very lively conversation as clear intersections between the attendee’s interest emerged. I am looking forward to the next one just to bask in the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration, something that is usually so difficult in an academic setting, but perhaps high desirable in the real world context.

Trip planning for Oxford has also begun, I can’t believe that’s just over a month away, but I’ll save that for another post.