Housecleaning and Reboot

My dear neglected readers (who mostly don't exist), it's high time for some housecleaning. My poor webpage had gone entirely without updates for the better part of a year, and that has now been remedied: there are more than a dozen new publications since I last posted on this poor blog, plus various new talks, changes in projects, etc. I've also gone through, updated the text, and reorganized things a bit, reflecting changes like the fact that I now mostly work on spatial computing and engineered self-organization and don't do much human-level AI work any more.

It's also time to change this embarassingly dry and sporadic blog to something a bit more meaningful. Now, this has been a bit of a stumbling block for me, since I'm posting under my real name and in my professional capacity. On the one hand, dear reader, I hope you'll understand that, cathartic though it might be, I feel it would be a poor idea to bare my every angst, fury, and imposter-syndrome moment to every colleague, competitor, and funding agency. On the other hand, I need to speak with my own voice here, or else this is just a piece of soulless drabble torn from my fingers out of a vague sense of duty to the God of Social Media. And that's no fun for me or anybody else.

So here's the plan: I'm going to make this an exercise in the positive. You, dear reader, should know that you're getting the real me, straight and unfiltered (else why would I write such godforsakenly circuitious sentences like in the last paragraph), but circumscribed. I've got enough good and interesting things going on in my research life that I'm going to focus on those and leave the tragedy and angst implicit. For those familiar with the scientific world, please take those details as read: for every paper accepted and every proposal funded, invisible siblings have failed to much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and so too with anything else I discuss.

Last note, before I vanish for now: I plan to stick to a set schedule as well, posting once a week. To make sure that I actually do this, I'm not going to post this until there's a queue of posts to come at least two months long. In the interests of full transparency, please feel free to compare the date of this post with the "last updated" mark on my web page and that will tell you how long that took.

And now, in the interests of health, wealth, and SCIENCE, I am cranking up the VNV Nation in my headphones and forging ahead in this godforsaken airport. See you next week...