I had an interview with a Texas A&M professor yesterday that was genuinely disappointing. The professor represented himself as someone who was highly knowledgeable about ML/AI and image processing in an agriculture related domain when he obviously did not know the language nor the technology at all. He runs a big lab with many PhD students and I shudder when I think about what they have to endure to get through his program. It has me rethinking how I want to go about all this and realize how spectacular were my professors, committee, and the entire program for my first PhD at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Category: Projects Page 2 of 7
Lorena just took this picture of the excavator digging the wine cellar in our new house. We are very excited to see the project finally in progress!!! It is a day to celebrate!!!
I spent the bulk of the weekend finishing up the first release candidate for the web browser based GRIME 3 water level measurement software release candidate. It really is a nice piece of software which we will be testing with one of our users in Idaho. You can download it here: GRIME 3 download.
The main functionality of the GaugeCam GRIME3 software is now running in a browser. It was a long weekend and I am sure I will need two or three more similar ones to get it to the point where I can focus on other things. It just feels great that it is working better than ever and I think both its precision and robustness are imporved.
I am well into the second half of my introductory (lay level) book on the philosophy of mind titled The Soul by J.P. Moreland, so the timely arrival of Science and Its Limits by Del Ratzsch in the mail was greatly appreciated. I expect to start in on it at the same slow pace am taking to read The Soul.
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.
It was at or near 100° Fahrenheit all weekend long, but we had the best and most relaxing weekend in a long time. Saturday morning we ran down to Stephenville to see a little of the very beautiful Tarleton State University campus. Today, after our worship meeting, we ran down to the Kroger grocery store (founded in 1955, the year of my birth) and had a piece of fried chicken–the best in town and way cheaper than a restaurant. After lunch, I drank a couple glasses of Bread and Butter Pinot Noir and worked on the GRIME3 water level measurement software package that now has a couple of places waiting on it in both Nebraska and Idaho. Then I took a nap and now I am waiting for the steak Lorena is cooking for me. Life is good today.
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 got to watch a PhD dissertation defense for a University of Kansas student who used our GRIME2 software for one of her dissertation chapters. She did a GREAT job. Troy, Mary, and I all worked with her on her project to measure stage in non-perennial streams.