I have an ongoing need to describe my professional qualifications and have never had an easy way to do that. Right now I am talking to several universities about a possible future PhD, people in the orbit of the GRIME3 water level measurement project, and in the near future, if I do not return to school and semi-retire, I will hope to do some contracting for which a page like this would be useful. So I created an about page here on the blog with a bunch of videos, a few images, and some succinct descriptions of some of the things I have done. It is not about some things I have done to show that I know how to do those things. It was pretty fun to put together and I hope to be able to add new things to the page every now and then.
I spend a great deal of time these days either using Artificial Intelligence to figure stuff out about health, finances, educational pursuits, and all kinds of trivia or literally building AI framework for my day job as tools for cell culture instrument work. Side-by-side with that, I have started reading about Philosophy of Mind and consciousness, maybe partially because of the AI work, but mostly because it has been an interesting topic to me since long before AI was on my radar. Right now I am firmly in the camp of non-believers in AI ever arriving at consciousness. That does not seem to be a rational position to me.
I started a conversation with an experimental psychology professor at Tarleton State University in Stephenville yesterday. It is about the possibility to collaborate on one of her research questions and possibly consider starting another PhD there if we are a fit personally and the tool set I bring can add value in her work. Lorena and I drove down there this morning and were stunned with the beauty and size of the campus. It is bigger and more beautiful than we expected. We are also investigating whether it makes sense for Lorena to finish a bachelor’s degree there and it looks like it might work out if enough of the college credits from her associate degree transfer cleanly.
I am starting to hear back from the emails I sent to a bunch of particular professors at universities in the region to see if they might entertain the idea of me providing volunteer work on a research question or data set they have as a way to explore whether it would make sense for me to start a PhD program with them. I have heard back from one good prospect at Texas A&M University in College Station who completely got the concept and understood my unusual skill set and proposed educational path. I also heard back from two who were not really interested–I really did appreciate the responses. Finally, there was one from UNT in Denton who said he really did not have a PhD slot for me, but he had a grad student that might be able to use the skills I brought to bear for her dissertation and he would be willing to talk to me about collaborating on that. He did not say anything about using that as a way for us to determine whether I might be a good PhD candidate for him in the future, just that he would be willing to collaborate if the project was right. He either did not read the email closely or was looking for a free resources so I marked that one off my list.
I have been to a lot of graduation ceremonies, but I have seen absolutely none that surpass those of University of Nebraska–Lincoln. The guy in the left in the photo is Dr. John Stranzl. He just finished his degree under the tutelage of the guy on the right, Dr. Troy Gilmore, who also served as my PhD advisor. This has been a labor of love for all three of us–we hope and expect to continue working together on GRIME Lab projects. These are two of my very best friends in the world. Lorena and I are watching the live stream of the graduation with great joy. We are all very proud of John.
I sent out four emails to Experimental Psychology PhD programs over the last couple of days. The one sent yesterday was to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas which is close enough so I could attend in-person. That is attractive to me as I am interested in participating in the community and that is not impossible, but harder remotely. I wrote to two additional schools in Texas, Texas Tech in Lubbock and East Texas A&M University in Commerce. It would be possible to drive to those schools a couple times per semester so that would not be a bad compromise if the program and professor is the right match. The last was at University of Alabama Huntsville because it seemed like a very good match with my skill set. I am hoping for a quick answer to get the ball rolling with one or two of them although I am really in no hurry to matriculate.
I am not sure anyone will be interested in taking me on in Experimental Psychology, but I definitely am interested and believe I have a research skill set that could be attractive to the right professor. If I cannot find the right program, I will reset my expectations and look for another field that is fundamentally different than my academic background, but that could benefit from the tools and experience I have to offer.
I have been looking in ways to continue my education since last evening. My short term game plan is to go visit Tarleton State University in Stephenville to see if I can contribute something to them while I am waiting a year to avoid paying out-of-state tuition. I have been corresponding with the head of the department and several professors there and looking forward to running over there and meeting them.
My buddy, John, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation yesterday afternoon and it was a glorious event. We are two old guys who did late career PhD’s with much joy. Honestly, I think John beat me badly in the quality of his doctoral studies and research. It is not that I did badly–I am wildly happy with what I did, but John is a force of nature. Congrats to a very dear friend.
I defended my PhD dissertation in June of 2023 at age 68. Our kids flew into Lincoln, Nebraska to watch my hooding in graduation that December when I had turned 69. I thought my formal education trajectory was over at that point, but have worked consistently on GaugeCam projects and remain an adjunct professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln since them. In addition to that, I have reached out to Tarleton State University about their Masters program in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence where they were amenable to my entrance there. I have decided I would like to continue contributing in these areas as long as I enjoy it, have friends with whom I can work, God is willing. In thinking about that, it dawned on me that I could go faster in the sorts of thing required for serious academic research, which is really about pushing the state of knowledge forward as measured by the production of meaningful publications, by writing research quality software rather than bullet proof, production quality software. And when I say that, I do not mean the usual trash software produced out of even the very “best” institutions for research. What I mean is software that other, non-computer scientists can use and extend easily. To that end, I just wrote a WhatsApp message to, Troy, my fellow traveler in these circles. We will see what he has to say.
Hey Troy. I am running the 800 and 8000 random images right now. I just had a thought. Why would it be a bad thing for me to quit trying to do production level robust software where the last 90% of the effort gets you 2% more functionality? My goals in all of this are to get papers published and to push the research forward in a way that benefits our work rather than production of hardened software. To that end, it kind of makes for me to aim at making the software I write profoundly more robust than typical research software, but for research ends, not production ends. Did that make any sense? That way, we are going to publish more and get further up the conditioning curve and move on to subsequent topics much more rapidly. Thoughts?
