Marvin Minsky is one of the pioneers in Artificial Intelligence and the co-founder of MIT AI Lab. Before coming to MIT, I had read his book titled "The Society of Mind", which explains some highly speculative theories on how minds (artificial or natural) might work in plain simple English that non-technical readers can understand. So when I saw that the "The Society of Mind" class by Marvin Minsky is being offered in spring, I registered for it and attended the first meeting of the class today. So what are my first impression of the class? Well, for starters, Professor Minsky looks a lot older than how he looks on the picture that is posted on his home page. The first part of the lecture was about some new theories from his new book titled "The Emotion Machine". The second part of the lecture was class discussion on the topics found in "The Society of Mind" book. Now that I have started taking classes in the engineering side of MIT, I have a noticeable difference in the presentation, discussion style, and personality between Sloan (and some extent ESD) students and the rest students at MIT. This observation is still highly speculative. Any comments from anyone about this? I am going to cut tonight's blogging activity short since I still have a case study to read. Later...

2/2/2005 11:14:31 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

School

I miss the Category feature in my previous blog software. Since I am new to Blogger, can someone tell how I can associate each blog entry with a category? Instead of reading the material for a class tomorrow, I started hacking with cybersam.org to correct the problem that I had the night before. I am just too compulsive to let the problem rest. On the bright side, I added new code to associate icons with categories. Nonetheless, I still question the wisdom of this decision since I will probably wind up using blogger anyway.

On the bright side, I went out for some beer with Chris, Dave, Matt, and Spiros after "Product Development" class. As usual, drinking helped to induce creativity, we came out with a few ideas that we may actually use as individual product design proposal for this class. Time for shut-eyes. I am getting tired.

2/1/2005 10:44:43 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [16]

Blog

So they decided to publish my tsunami experience at MIT after only being there for a month. Check this out News @ MIT Sloan The printed copy will be available to all students next week. In reality, it is really not that dramatic as it sounds, but it always does after applying a set of "adjectives" to the story. I have to give credits to the writer who did a splendid job in conveying my thoughts into words. This is best line from the passage, which I reflect how I feel from the tragedy and I quote:

Although he describes himself as "agnostic," Chow says the experience has left him feeling more spiritual. "I should cherish my life, and cherish life around me. It brings a different perspective to life, and that perspective actually brings a different set of values to me."

With this, I am going to bring closure to this tsunami thing. It would be great if you can contribute something to help the less fortunate, domestic or international, tsunami or non-tsunami related, big or small. More importantly whatever you do, cherish your life and the life around you. Tsunami aside, I really had a great time traveling to Thailand with Camille and Brian. And thanks again to those who inquired about my well-being when the disaster struck.

2/1/2005 10:23:01 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [10]

Personal

I have not blogged for a while on my personal website www.cybersam.org since its blogging software (BlogX) isn't adequate for editing and publishing. I got tired of it after a while. But so much have happened since I last blogged in April 2004 and I really want to do start doing a "Dear diary" moment again (Yikes). I got my act together today and tried installing/configuring the new version of the blogging software that I use, which by the way has been renamed to dasBlog. But I gave up after 5 fruitless hours of fiddling around with .NET and IIS (Inherent Insecurity Server). Now that I am back in graduate school full time and still working part time, I can't afford to waste time mucking around with senseless software issues. So I signed up with blogger just to get me started with blogging again. We'll see what happens.

1/31/2005 1:56:02 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Comments [15]

Blog