Subramanian Ramamoorthy blogging on AI ‘n’stuff

My old UTexas Qualitative Reason & Intelligent Robotics Labmate Subramanian "Ram" Ramamoorthy is blogging now as a lecturer (i.e. assistant prof) at the University of Edinburgh.  He is the second former labmate of mine to end up there.  (The first is former NNRG labmate Jim Bednar.)

Bellevue, WA: Just like back home, only not really.

In moving to Seattle Laura and I put a lot of effort into finding a great place to live.   We wanted a place that was suitable for living with a small child and an active dog -- I.e. a house with a yard, in an area with good schools, but with a short commute to …

Why sell to half-price books?

Laura and I unpacked all our books yesterday and realized that we have a shelf-space crisis in our new house, so we decide to try selling some to Half-Price Books. We picked out three boxes of books, probably around 40 books total (though maybe more, I didn't count). The were mostly hardbound, and many fairly …

More thoughts on leaving Pittsburgh

Mike Madison at Pittsblog picked up on on some of my parting negativity about PIttsburgh, adding: Just when Pittsburgh is getting ready to blow out the candles on its (cup)cake, something like this happens -- the sort of thing that Lenore Blum and Project Olympus are trying to avoid by building stronger connections between local …

My favorite Obama quote

The thing I think people should feel confident in is that I'm going to make these judgments not based on some fierce ideological pre-disposition but based on what makes sense. I'm a big believer in evidence. I'm a big believer in fact. You know, if somebody shows me we can do something better through a …

Seeking good Seattle blogs

After four days at the new job I'm starting to almost have the time and energy to read a few blogs at home after dinner. I've been reading some Seattle blogs since I accepted the offer with Amazon back in the beginning of May, including Citizen Rain, Seattlest, Seattle Metblogs, and Seattle Transit Blog. These …

Random things to love about Seattle

We've only been in Seattle for a few days, but so far my impressions have been almost entirely positive. Here are a bunch of random things I love so far: Mt. Rainier in the evening sunlight. I've seen more Priuses and Smart Cars here in five days than I've seen in Pittsburgh in the last …

Yinz take care

I haven't been blogging lately, because all my spare energy has been devoted first to job hunting, then getting ready to move, and now moving. I've accepted a position the transaction risk management group at Amazon.com, working on automated fraud detection systems. So Laura, Maggie, and I are re-diasporizing to Seattle. I'm not going to …

PLASTK version 0.1

In a departure from my recent blog themes, I'd like to get back to AI and machine learning today to announce the first development release of PLASTK: The Python Learning Agent Software Toolkit. From the PLASTK README.txt file: PLASTK is a Python class library for building and experimenting with learning agents, i.e. software programs that …

Helping the Stars Align for Entrepreneurs

In my recent posts about the role of big companies in developing a local start-up economy I said: People often ask why Pittsburgh, with it’s great universities, isn’t seeding more startups. Maybe it’s because an essential missing component is a large pool of large tech companies to employ university engineers and scientists after graduation, until …