Congratulations to our new PhD, Dr. Jayapandian!

Today my friend Magesh, or I should call, Dr. Jayapandian, successfully defended his thesis, "Automated Creation of Database Forms". Simply put, his work can automatically generate smart and usable search forms from a database schema (optionally data and queries) with little or no human intervention. This can either completely automate the process of form creation, or provide an initial design which humans can customize. For more details, I recommend reading his VLDB'08 paper.

Magesh is an amazing guy. Incredibly nice person, thoughtful, smart, funny, and hard-working. He is often the last to leave the lab at night and first to come in the morning. He is also the guy who brings a cake for almost everybody else's birthday or other special occasions.

I am very happy that he is finally on the other end of the tunnel, and I wish him the best for all future endeavors. I am going to miss you, my friend.

Don't be a jerk - the takeway from the talk "how to get research funding"

Today I attended a very informative and entertaining talk given by Prof. John Laird. The theme is about how to get research funding from various government agencies and industry. I think I can summarize what I remembered here, beside the glaring title of this post:

• be a low-maintenance, thoughtful, responsible, and useful team player, no matter it's to your program manager or collaborator (or the way John put it, "don't be a jerk")
  
• do good research
• make yourself known to the field