Dr. Mythalez

The PhD post!

The past three years basically came down to this.
In fact, the 20 years of my education comes down to this- "Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science" aka Ph.D. ;)

So, herewith, the author of this blog should be addressed as Dr. Mythalez. :P

PhD thesis submitted !!!

i don't remember since when i have been waiting to announce this, and write a post regarding it. definitely more than year! yes, people everywhere and nowhere, the PhD thesis is now sealed and desposited for 'examination' aka 'viva' aka 'defence'. this procedure involves professors both internal and external to the university grilling me regarding all aspects of the thesis and beyond for as many hours as they choose. my supervisors would be just mute spectators in the room. the examiners apparently tend to question both the higher purpose of the thesis (like why it is significant or novel) and also the minute details (like how and why this particular parameter was chosen). anyways, since this is scheduled for end of october, I pretty much have more than 40 absolutely free days staring at me :D .... yipppe !!

\begin{bragging}
£$€ - 123 pages of PhD thesis [quite on the smaller side but as is said, the smaller the thesis, the better and more precise it is ;) ]
€£$ - 3 years 14 days [would have been much less than three years if not for the vacations my supervisors and I have taken over the past 2 months]
$€£ - consumed approximately £37,000 as stipend and more than £40,000 was paid as fees on my behalf by the school to the university [yeah, it is a strange system :P]. also several thousands of £s were spent to provide for my various conference attendances ;).
€$£ - considering the problems and ill-health faced over the last many months, the fact that i still managed to complete on time deserves applause :P
£€$ - there should be more points to brag about, definitely. but i don't seem to be able to recollect them right now :P.
\end{bragging}

okay, now that we are done with this, let us evaluate my current position:
%& am jobless and workless and thus not even being paid a penny by anyone.
&% am going to become homeless soon as I have decided to give up my room/house at end of this month.
%% have no job offers yet, haven't actually applied anywhere that i might want to, don't even know what kind of job i would like.
&& ................. ...... .... .... .... .... [intentionally left blank to represent several points ;) ]

fine, now let the celebrations, packing+storage, travel etc etc begin !!

print .. bind .. submit!

so, after 20 days, we revisit the thesis process.

in the meantime, that is, while Nr was reading the thesis version, i was busy doing other things, also going to Cyprus, attending a conference, presenting a paper, enjoying the calm sea and so on. and i return today to find his commented version on the desk.

and no real comments! even the abstract which i expected to be mauled had only one word-change suggested! working on these comments took less than 30 mins. and I was ready with the thesis version to be submitted!!

ofcourse, i had skipped writing the "acknowledgements" section until now. even Nr pointed out that atleast something should be written there ;). and so i manufactured one in a hurry and voila!

here we are, with the ready pdf .. for 5 copies to be printed, bound and submitted!

and that will be done tomorrow ..... !!!!!

day49 - day50 pretty nifty!

day49 - tuesday - put up the appendix graphs and describe the results and why they don't matter, hence why they ended up in the appendix intstead of the main part.

day50 - do the small itsy bitsy changes that were noted down in the process over the last 50 days but never acted upon. and ofcourse, write the abstract .. finally! and done!!

the second version of the thesis is now ready for your perusal :P.

so the statistics:
£ around 125-130pages depending on how i compile it.
£ 50 days of procrastination + work + weekend
£ 35 posts of this blah!

next post might arrive when Nr and Nj look at this version and suggest any final changes..... am sure they will, especially for the abstract .. it is quite amateurish ;)

day43 to day48 - all posts are late :P

day43 - revised chapter 5 aka Empirical Evaluation ... had to battle with lots of justifys, whys and why-is-the-graph-so warriors .. tackled them all except for the easy one requiring a figure to explain how a parameter works ..

day44 - revised chapter 6 aka Conclusions/FutureWork .. the earlier version of future work was somewhat massacred by Nr, but his questions did help in the process of raising it from the ashes again :P. the last paragraph has been left out .. apparently, world peace, cure for cancer and time-travel arent enough .. we need more wider and general direction for future work as well .. will work later when in the zone ;)

day45 - the example for chapter 4 .. something that has been delayed for so long .. and we find what? that a somewhat preliminary version already exists in the minithesis .. it is just a matter of copying and updating it .. and so we do .. not much of a task at all !! and follow that up with revising all the figures that demanded touch ups and the new figure that was left out yesterday.

day46 - saturday .. what do you expect?

day47 - sunday .. why do you even bother?

day48 - anti-appendicitis = generating graphs for the second part of the appendix. also generated input and started running the final set of experiments for this set of graphs. also took a look at the abstract that is to be written and gave up for the day.

\begin{abstract}
It is all blah!
\end{abstract}

day42 - the bolt and the blue

soon the day will come when this blog will tire of these pathetic thesis posts and rebel against the author. it will not let him login, not let him add more of his asinine daily commentary onto the burgeoning web. it will try to banish all those incongruous posts and hope to go back to its original state of bliss. and it might fail and fade into oblivion. or i might finish with the thesis before the blog loses patience with me. let us hope for the latter :P.

revision of chapter 4 wasn't tricky. well, almost. all of it was done except for the example part. yes, we are back to struggling with the infamous examples. we need to extend the running example to explain this part of the thesis as well. i knew it was coming, even while i was writing this chapter and consciously ignored to add the example. and now i will have to do it .. tomorrow?

also started the revision of chapter 5 aka Empirical Evaluation. most of the comments seem to be "why" or "justify". blah, i say.

day41 - on the run?

i took a skewed weekend break, that is, friday and saturday and half of sunday. no, i didn't sincerely go to lab on sunday afternoon, but i did make attempts towards work and revise some of the second chapter aka Related Work. however, i was being too lazy and too smart for my own benefit and skipped most of the tough comments and tackled the straightforward bits only.

that meant, my work today turned out to be much larger than it looked. the morning was anyway devoured by references for the camera ready version of the workshop paper. an annoying issue i cant care to elaborate :P. and the afternoon, this chapter was revised to what i now hope is 'almost' perfection'. and attention can now be focussed on chapter 4 aka Adaptation.

day37 - spruce

finally, we have the pleasure of creating a new directory. and copy files carefully and lovingly :P. yes, the work on the next version of the the-sis has begun!

and i chose chapter 3 for the honours. it had the least number of comments and Nr had even praised it. yeah, it is an extremely rarely occurrence of Nr appreciating my writing. in fact, anyone's writing i think ;).

also, didn't have to stalk Nj for his set of comments. luckily, found him in a nearby bay, discussing something with some student and waited patiently with a keen eye for him to get ready to leave and then caught his attention and then put forward my demands :D.

done with chapter 3 and then turned the attention to chapter 2 aka Related Work. it is always the most hated part of anything i write. somehow. even just revising it seem to be quite annoying :D and that made me quit for the day.... lagging quite behind in the revision process

day36 - dealing with the appendix

hey .. that rhymed so naturally :D

so the not so particularly important glossary was made proper. the other part of appendix that are those no-value-adding results. you see, sometimes while describing an experimental setup, i claim that i am showing results with these parameters only and not those because their results are also similar. thus, i was doing the good thing of not adding redundancy. however, these redundant results need to be included in the appendix for the sake of completeness and to prove that we weren't fibbing and being lazy :P

also, i can now start the revision. but where are the comments of Nj on all the chapters? haven't received them yet. should i start stalking him now? ;)

day35 - refine to refer

due to the post-chapter-completion-lethargy disorder, my feeble attempts towards work were mostly futile.

the only saving grace was that i managed to clean up the bibliography, and cite the references in the proper format now .... was using a stop-gap arrangement before ;)

tomorrow, we shall 'gloss' the thesis :P

day34 - back with a wham bam?

finally, after 20 days, i am back to the great task of continuing the thesis writing. the last chapter awaited. given that it had been effectively postponed for 3 weeks, it kind of deserved some respect. or so we thought. but less than 5 hours after i sat down to tackle it, it was done. there it lay in front of me, staring expectantly at its own fate :P.

the first part of the chapter was the "Conclusions", which was basically a summary of the summaries of all the chapters until then. wasn't too hard to write. the second part is the more interesting "Future Work". i wonder why we need that in a thesis. do i really intend to continue working on this topic beyond my phd? also some not-so-well-acquainted-with-research might question, if you do have future work, how come you are already done with your phd? :P. Nr had advised me that the future work should be written such that it is not too close and too small to the thesis contributions. otherwise, we would be making the task of a nagging examiner easier and he/she would question why this future work is not already part of the phd thesis ;).

anyway, i looked to Su aka nikheel for inspiration and he suggested the "cure for cancer" and "world peace" as two probable tasks that i might consider listing as part of "Future work". i also wanted a third task. he suggested "warp speed", whatever that meant. but i felt that "time travel" would be more suitable. as you see, once time-travel is solved, there will never ever be any need for listing any future work as all work of the future can be easily obtained by travelling to the future. thus, the problem of "Future Work" can be resolved once and for all, if only someone takes up my suggestion of "time-travel" as future work ;)

oh, by the way, the last chapter has also been sent to Nr and Nj. tomorrow, might be the day to work on the glossary, refine the references, and ponder about the appendix!

temporary break

no, i did not miss out posting about this yesterday. there was nothing to post! thesis writing has been put temporarily on hold. so we stop this phase at day33. next phase might begin after 2 weeks!!

until, the blog will be back to its normal duty. that would mean rare posts and completely non work related posts :P.

day33 - was completely work free!!

and not really my fault. due to other appointments, only managed to go the lab in the afternoon. and soon thereafter, had to leave the lab for other appointments :P. so no work.

oh, by the way, there is a problem regarding the expected submission time for the thesis. yeah, writing it as quickly as i seem to be, doesnt seem to help much in the long run. that is because, i will be taking 2 weeks holiday starting next week. and soon after i am back and all set to work on draft-2, Nr will be on vacation for 2 weeks. So, he wont be able to read my draft-2 until he returns at the end of august. and since i will be on vacation next 2 weeks, i wont be able to give draft-2 to Nr before he leaves. so, all in all, the chances of submitting the thesis before september have almost evaporated now. but yeah, according to Nr's estimate, the work required to be done from now on until the submission time of the thesis needn't be more than 3weeks !!

but since, we dont have overlapping 2-3 weeks until september, there is no point, is there? :P

day32 - chapter five has gone live

i surprise myself with my sincerity :P. as i ought to, read through the results section in the morning. edited the simulation parameters section. generated good colour version of the graphs and then went through it all together and then mailed to Nr and Nj.

what to do next is the question? one chapter is remaining - the "Conclusions and Future Work". Future work? what should i write in future work? i don't intend to do any work in the future. and i dont expect anyone to extend this work for the future either ;). even if someone's wants to, he/she can go make up his/her own research questions. why should i blabber something now for his/her benefit? notice how i have painstakingly used both genders while referring to this hypothetic future researcher? given the extremely "large" number of women in cs research, i guess am being a bit too hopeful :P.

i had a look at another thesis's last chapter to see what should be written in these concluding chapters. it was huge, 15 pages long. my main meaty chapters are of such length. even, if i dedicate a page to every section in my thesis, i won't end up with such a big chapter. anyway's will look at this chapter work later.

so instead of that, considered writing the appendix, basically a glossary of all the terms. also considered making a camera ready copy of the workshop paper. yet, did nothing. completing the chapter seemed enough achievement for the day :P

day31 - experimental fun

chapter 5 = Empirical Evaluation

it's all there in the journal paper. why not just copy paste and forget all about it? oh yeah, increase the size of the graphs. somehow bigger graphs mean better graphs? and what about the tables with the other results? make them bolder ?

oh yeah, so this is the second last chapter.. to talk about the experimental setup, the parameters for the simulations, the simulations and then their results. and finally, why the results are the way they are. somehow, it has always been very easy to explain the results. particularly its vagaries, the uneven flows and all that. can always find a convincing excuse for any surprising bends or turns ;)

so yeah, more than half of the chapter was done on the day in just 3 hours. all of it could have been done in another couple of hours .. but who bothered!! :P

so, to finish the chapter and to move onto more complicated things on monday

day30 - time was thrifty?

whole day was taken up by other work related activities ..
not my fault !!!

day29 - next chapter in line

proof read and sent over chapter 4 to Nr and Nj.

no more work could be done today or can be done tomorrow due to other assignments.

whoa, that sounds very very formal eh? :P

day28 - chapter 4 has no more weight

chapter 4 = Adaptation.tex
the tentative chapter 5 has been scrapped and put into chapter 4 as another section!

and the initial part of the chapter also written today, diagrams modified and everything done. all this took just 3 hours today.

was supposed to be proof reading it now, but too sleepy. so this blogpost ends now.

day27 - chapter 4 has begun

and then we have some days, in which i start working soon after i reach the lab, and the work gets quickly done, and no procrastination at all except for the sleepy period after lunch, and all the expected work for the day gets done much before the time you expected it to be done!!

the day started with the decision to vanish chapter 5. well not exactly, but to merge it with chapter 4 so that now my thesis will have only 6 chapters. and of this merged chapter, more than half of it was completed today. ofcourse, it mainly involved merging and copying from minithesis and the journal paper, but still it was work and was done well. yes, am a glad soul for the day :P.

for a brief part, had to look at my code to identify the exact utility functions i was actually using. that was a scary time. i think i am quite relieved that i won't have to deal with this code anymore :D. that says a lot about my programming etiquette eh :D.

so, can we finish chapter 4 tomorrow? remember, by the original scheme, this would have meant finishing both chapters 4 and 5 ;). oh the funny part of this incomplete chapter 4 is that, i have finished the second half of it. the first half is actually waiting for its turn :D

day24 - no work and so no bore ;)

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