Well, today I woke up a bit later than usual (I’ve been waking around 8.30 like clockwork since I arrived in this city), probably due to the lack of good sleep the night before. Anyway, that was all good, I got up and headed into UW for my first class of the day: Hot Topics in Data Management Systems. As I had mentioned previously, the lecturer for this was very enthusiastic when I went to talk to her in person – this translated exactly into the classroom. Very energetic, knowledgeable and interactive with the class, this promises to be a very enjoyable class. No readings for the course this week, but next week there are a couple of papers to read on the topics we’ll be discussing, and that looks to be the norm for the rest of the quarter.

After class it was off to the HUB for lunch and emails (I love having wireless access in the café). The general seating areas in the HUB are rather large. They range from little coffee table like seating to barstools and high tables to booths with very cushy seats. All in all it’s a damn cool place to eat and just hang out, really.

After that I went back to the CSE department to meet up with my advisor, whom I had emailed to let her know I was coming. This was a good meeting, and we made some headway into getting me the logins and details of everything that I required. Hopefully I’ll be able to access the reading material I need to go over for Ubiquitous Computing before I need to have read it. I also just did the general check in with how I was going and what I was up to/enrolled in, that kind of thing. Good meeting, and Lindsay is a nice person who definitely wants to help out and make sure that things are running smoothly for me. All good.

Next up was the Computer Science Colloquium, which is a weekly seminar held by visiting lectures which seems to involve quite a bit of question-and-answer as well. This week’s was given by a guy from MIT on the role of computers in treating chronic illness, particularly with evidence in epilepsy and chronic heart conditions, although he did point out a bunch of other applications. This was a really interesting lecture, particularly as he bitched out the medical field for making doctors do manual, tedious data analysis that they weren’t particularly good at anyway, when a computer could do it. He argued that physicians were still very necessary, but that they needed to separate out what they did well (examining and talking to patients, etc.) from what computers could do (large amounts of data analysis, pattern matching) and also that for chronic illness, the feedback loop needed to be much shorter than it currently is. For example, often medication will have an effect (and side effects) within two or three days, but the patient won’t see the physician for another month or six weeks or something. He gave out some statistics (which were reasonably scary) about a lot of deaths that could have been avoided through some of the practices he was suggesting (which mostly seemed like common sense). Anyway, very cool, I think it would’ve been interesting to a lot of people and not just Computer Science people.

After the Colloquium they had snacks served in the Atrium of the CSE building. Snacks were ok, but since I still didn’t really know anyone to talk to it was a bit weird. Didn’t really feel like throwing myself at a group of people in the hopes that it would work. Not just yet, anyway.

After that it was back to Greg’s. The rain was pummeling the ground, and the bus that I took was packed. There was another bus with the same number (the 44) traveling directly behind us which was practically empty. I hate it when the schedules get all messed up like that.

Back at Greg’s it was dinner and conversation as I entertained Greg with my general woes of administration, then I talked to Anastasia on the phone and went to bed.