Finally, after just about five years of effort, my Ph.D. thesis is complete and bound! As you can see from the picture below, it’s quite a weighty tome - just over 2.2kg all together.
If you are bored, you can read it in PDF form here (25MB download).
“I am pleased to inform you that the examiners have recommended that you be admitted to the above degree [of PhD in Computer Science] subject to minor corrections”
The examiners’ reports are 16 pages long though, so there are quite a lot of corrections. I have until 4 May to get everything done then it’s a long wait until I can graduate in November and officially call myself a doctor!
Last week I had the viva voce exam for my PhD. Rather scary being quizzed for three hours on everything that you’ve done in the last four years!
Sadly the result is currently ambiguous. Normally I would have either passed with minor corrections (which I would have three months to do) or have to resubmit with major corrections within twelve months. I am stuck on the fence in between these two outcomes - my examiners recommended that I would need six months to complete my minor corrections.
So I’m not quite sure whether I should be celebrating or not! I have been through the notes made by my examiners and already corrected quite a lot this weekend. I have quite a bit of work to do on my background chapter and I need to explain the statistical method that we used for our empirical experiment. I also need to add a new chapter (although this will only be three or four pages long!).
Hopefully I can get everything completed within three months. I don’t really want to lose another summer to writing - I really want to get out and about and explore Dorset while I am living here.
I should hear back from the Faculty as to what they have decided (if anything!) in the next week or so. The time doesn’t start until I have an official note about the outcome.
It’s been a long time in the making but my Ph.D. thesis is finally taking shape! I reckon I have just another dozen or so paragraphs left to write and then I can declare it complete! At last count it was 33,943 words long, and has 151 figures, 56 tables, 167 citatations and 333 pages. The part of the thesis that counts to the page limit (maximum 250 pages) is now exactly 200 pages long. The extra paragraphs will probably add another 5 or so pages to that.
My submission deadline is Thursday 13th, so at the time of writing this I have just 3 days, 21 hours and 45 minutes left! Hopefully I have enough time on Monday and Tuesday evening this week to put the finishing touches to it.
After Thursday, well, I really haven’t thought about that yet. The 13th is kind of like an event horizon beyond which you can’t see until you actually get there! One thing is for certain: I will be relaxing a bit more than I have for the last three months or so!
After a short hiatus, I have once again starting bashing through my thesis with the intention of finishing it off as soon as possible. I managed to write a good 10 pages in the last day or so, and with 6 days after Christmas to work on it, I should be at the point where I can say I’ve at least written the draft of six of the nine chapters.
After receiving some rather cryptic e-mails from the Director of Music at the University, I found out last week that I had been awarded the Colyer-Fergusson Music Prize. The prize-giving was held in the Senate at University yesterday - there were quite a few important-type people there including the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (from whom I received my prize).
The Colyer-Fergusson Prize is awarded in memory of Sir James Colyer-Fergusson to honour students who have made an outstanding contribution to the musical life of the campus. I have played trumpet in the University Concert Band and Big Band for the last 5 years that I’ve been in Kent and I’ve been on the Music Society committee for the past two years as Concert Band librarian. I seem to always get roped into helping out with musical activities around the campus from stewarding the orchestra and chorus concerts in Canterbury Cathedral to setting up and clearing up the Concert Band rehearsals every Wednesday.
I hadn’t really anticipated that I’d ever get a prize for what I’ve done, but it’s nice to get a bit of recognition for all the hours I’ve committed to the Music Society over the past few years. I still have at least one more year left: I am still on the Music Society committee next year too!
It’s that time of the year again. Students have spent the last two terms swatting up on what they need to know for the exams at the end of the year. I get to earn lots of money by invigilating them and making sure they don’t cheat!
Exams at the University of Kent are quite a big deal. Unlike other universities which do their exams at the end of each semester, all the exams are crammed into the six-week summer term. For the first few weeks there are exams happening all over campus - in the sports halls, as well as in Darwin and Keynes colleges. There are also a few people with special arrangements such as extra time elsewhere.
Invigilating is quite dull though. And you have to spend three hours stood up and not being able to sit down (unless you want to feel the wrath of the senior invigilator). Luckily most of my shifts are with the students with special arrangements, but one today was in the main sports hall looking after some 400-odd students. In the exam halls there isn’t much to do as an invigilator. Occasionally a student wants extra paper or a cup of water. Even more rarely a student wants to go to the toilet (you have to follow them in!) but that’s about it. The exciting parts are setting out the exam papers before the exam starts (and reading them if they look half-interesting) and collecting up the answers at the end (and trying not to read them!).
When I am invigilating over where the students with special arrangements do their exams, I have the added luxury of being able to sit down and even to do some work. Luckily you are only ever invigilating a few students at a time so they don’t demand too much attention. Many of them have 25% or even 50% extra time for their exams so you could get a 5 hour or 6 hour shift. This is good for the bank balance! The main advantage is that there are few distractions so I can actually get on and do a decent amount of work.
For the students I guess it’s a completely different ballgame. The exam they are sitting might mean the difference between a good job and stacking shelves in a supermarket, so they are quite often very stressed. This year there’s the added stress of not even knowing if the exam they are sitting will be marked as a number of lecturers are refusing to mark coursework and exams in a dispute over pay. My view is that while lecturers might have a reasonable claim for an increase in their pay over and above inflation, they should find alternative methods of emphasising their point other than an assessment boycott. Ultimately, a final-year student who has not had all their assessments and exams marked may not be able to graduate when expecting - this is likely to have a significant impact on whether they can go into a job after finishing at university. The university might also have to make arrangements for first- and second-year students to proceed to the next year of study without first having all their assessment and exam marks. Certainly not a good state of affairs, particularly as there doesn’t seem to be any movement with regards to getting the lecturers’ pay deal sorted out.
Well, not much to read here of late which either means one of two things:
Luckily it’s the latter! So what have I been doing?
PhD
Lots of work here thankfully! I’ve just finished writing an algorithm for finding the faces of a graph and then to be able to find the dual graph. The idea here is that I can use the dual graph to be able to partition a graph into two parts along a roughly vertical or horizontal line. The reason for doing this is that we want to try to move big chunks of maps around when we are drawing metro maps. Here’s a recent example (bit small really!) of a result we have created of the Madrid Metro:
Zoomed in on the centre:
Still a little more work to make it usable!
Websites
Still working on my websites! I’ve ben spending a lot of time recently on adding a large amount of new content to my Jcoord package - the second development release of version 1.1 is now up and ready for people to try out. It now has 6 different co-ordinate systems, lots of datums (data?) and ellipsoids making it very flexible. Hopefully I will have one more development version (1.1-c) and then I can release version 1.1 sometime before June.
Another interesting (and useful!) bit of work is on earthtools.org. Google have recently released version 2 of their maps API, so I have made a few changes to make earthtools use that API. I have also added a new layer to the map to show height contours:
I managed to do this suprisingly quickly - only took a weekend to write the code. I have left my computer running at home today generating a set of tiles for the whole UK (116,000 for the UK and Ireland) which I then need to process graphically to make them transparent and then upload them. I hope to have this done in the next week or two.
It’s kind of annoying that the data that I use (from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) seems to have been cropped for the coastline about 600m too far to the west. I know it’s not a problem with my contours being in the wrong place or the wrong scale as they are spot-on accurate inland. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. 
Other work
Teaching has finished for this year - the students now have three weeks left before their first exams at the start of May. May will be busy with invigilating. I’ve already invigilated three exams a couple of weeks ago and there are two more exams next week for Electronics MSc students. I have three and a half hours of revision sessions to cover at the start of May too.
Also been doing some work on the Computing Service Online Helpdesk. I’m quite intrigued as to the politics involved in what should be a pretty simple application, but there we go. I’ve made my best shot at it and hopefully it goes down well. I start to integrate my changes onto the live server right after I’ve made a cup of tea (it is 11 o’clock after all)!
As a postgrad at Uni I get the chance to teach unsuspecting undergrads on some of their courses. Last term I was teaching first-year undergrads on their object-oriented programming with Java course. The teaching itself is fun, but the downside is marking their assessments.
I’ve just had the last assessment back to be marked. I should have something in the region of 30 scripts to go through. I just get the raw Java source code, so I need to compile it (to see if it works - a surprising number of scripts don’t compile), print out all the source code and errors (which took ten minutes on the printer and generated goodness-knows-how-many redundant cover sheets), collate each part of everyone’s submission and staple them together. This takes a good hour before I’ve even bothered to look at the marking scheme!
The next challenge is to decypher the marking scheme and try to work out how marks should be allocated. This time there isn’t a specific scheme, so I don’t need to worry too much about justifying every single mark that I deduct. It can get quite demoralising when I try to mark scripts with lots of errors - especially if the student hasn’t bothered to ask for help.
Hopefully this marking doesn’t take too long and make me go too insane!
