Finally done with course work

Finally finished all the finals and TA work.

Since this is the end of the semester, I would like to make a summary of the work I have done.

OK, this year, I took 2 courses, one about numerical linear algebra. I think this class is pretty good. I finally do not have scare away from those stupid matrix and SVD stuff. But unfortunately, I didn't spend much time on this. I think the projects on this class are pretty cool. Especially the Arnoldi process. I didn't expect such a large sparse matrix can be handled by only few iterations.

The SVD stuff, LU decomposition, QR decomposition(finally I got a chance to show off in this Blog:) I think I won't use these much in future research work. But combined with convex optimization, it should help.

Well... The 2nd course : distributed operating system. The instructor is a good talker and explains everything very well. Unfortunately, I am an eager learner(not kNN--"lazy learner"). He speaks so slow that I couldn't help getting asleep? Is this my fault?

Anyway, it's good to learn the concept about lock/unlock, synchronization, multi threading, PVM, messger system, shared memory, net messenger server, RPC, lock server, distributed shared memory, distributed mutual exclusive/snapshot. All the terms sound very cool... I did really bad in the final. But who cares? (PHD do not care about course work. That becomes my quote now. hehe...)

Finally, let's talk about the TA work. I am working as a TA for Subbarao Kambhampati.
To be frank, this is the toughest TA work I've ever have. 4 homeworks (the last one has around 50 questions, which really drove me crazy!!!!) and 5 projects. I was grading either the homework or the project nearly every weekend. So many stuff.

But from another perspective, I've never understand AI concept so clear. Rao connected agent design, search, planning, MDP, logic, Bayesian network, learning so well that I have to admit I learned much more by doing this TA work than taking a course. Actually, I don't think I learned anything really exciting when I took Dr. Liu's AI. Rao did a much better job. But I don't like his projects. No challenge, though lots of students spent way too much time on lisp. Anyway, I would like to thank to this experience. (I guess this is due to my gf. She changed me a lot!)

But...... I have to work as TA again next semester, both AI and data mining. I want to kill someone.....