As I approach the completion of my degree’s course requirements, and realize that I have survived an incredibly ambitious semester (some would say “year”), I am taking the time to give myself a nice pat on the back, and not feel guilty about taking it easy for a little while. Having received my ethics approval just last Friday, I slept and lounged extra well this weekend. I will be recruiting for subjects within the next week, so keep an eye out. I am looking forward to having some quiet time to engage in data collection for my thesis this month and continue my lit review over the holiday. Dan Perkel’s research in particular has lead me to a body of research that affords me the vocabulary I need to articulate my ideas. I am looking forward to some serious reading, writing and thinking time.

I am also taking the opportunity to follow up on old leads, one of which was Prof. Gerald Penn’s invitation last year to speak to his lab a bit about my research. He was one of the guest speakers at the recent KMDI Industry Roundtable event which I helped organize and facilitated (along with guests Jon Crowley, Andrew Lovett-Baron and Prof. Chris Collins), and we finally arranged for a lab visit this week. Gerald runs a very interesting lab doing incredible things with text summarization vis-à-vis natural language processing. With an interdisciplinary background himself in the humanities, I am very much looking forward to having a conversation with the folks there.

Looking ahead, the first half of 2011 is already promising to be conference galore. At least, if I am actually able to attend some of these!