merpel

I’ve never complained about my life being boring, simply because I just have a very cool life. The past two weeks have again been full of exciting things. Such as getting to talk about my work during a presentation, in front of a camera for a little research video and in a phone interview for a research magazine. The weird thing about the talk at the colloquium was, was that it was in Tilburg and it’s honestly very weird to be back there while not working there anymore. I’m having a great time here in Amsterdam but I do miss the Tilburg campus. The VU campus needs more trees! Anyway, I’m also finding out more about the field I’m working in now, I’m starting to figure out which way to go for my project (I think, we have another project meeting tomorrow, so we’ll see if the rest of the project agrees ;)), I’m gathering data, working on a paper, preparing for another presentation etc..anyway so much about work though, as there is more to life, way more.

On the last day of October I went to the Efteling again. This time with my uncle. The Efteling always rocks! Afterwards we had dinner with Paul and my other uncle at Da Atillio in Breda. I slept the whole way on the train back to Amsterdam. The Sunday after I spent pretty much the whole day in bed again, not really ill, but definitely super-tired. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been cycling to work a lot (check it out here), or maybe because I just hadn’t fully recovered yet from the bug that I had caught a week earlier…

Last Friday we got to see a bit more of Amsterdam life at a party that a co-worker threw to celebrate his new kitchen (from which fabulous food emerged the whole evening). On Saturday night, Steve and Veronique came over for dinner and afterwards we went to the Amsterdam Museumnacht. If you’re too lazy to click the link, it’s a special evening, once a year, during which 42 museums in Amsterdam are open until 02:00 and have special programmes.

We started at FOAM, the Amsterdam Photography Museum, which is one of my favourites. It’s located in a gorgeous old building, but has a mix of old and new elements in its interior. We had to queue to get in and inside it was filled with hip and trendy people and fun things to do (such as commenting on photos via post-its). After FOAM we set out to the Museum of Bags and Purses (mainly a venue for Veronique and me but the boys seemed to enjoy it too). On the way to the handbag exhibitions, we popped into Museum Geelvinck, simply because it was on the way. The cool thing about and event like the Museumnacht is that you go to places you would normally not go to. Museum Geelvinck (it’s built in 1687 and the rooms are decorated in styles from that era) is nice, albeit a bit small and I would have liked more explanatory texts with things, but that’s personal. What’s also cool about it is that it’s run by volunteers and they have concerts on Sundays, so I will probably go back for that sometime. The Museum of Bags and Purses was fun, again located in one of those gorgeous canal houses and there was a lot to see. They also had bags and purses for sale but those were rather pricey (besides the fact that I prefer rucksacks ;)).

When we left the bags and purses, it was just past 22:00, so we could go to the Amsterdam city archives, located in an old bank. The reason we wanted to go there after 22:00 is that at that time musicbloggers would start playing music to a flickr expo of photos of Amsterdam. Maybe we were there too early, but it hadn’t yet turned into the party I’d hoped it would be. Fortunately, there was plenty of other stuff to see. Downstairs in the building you walk through the enormous door that used to lock the safe to an exhibition area and a film room. In the film room, acoustic bands were playing and their concert was filmed and projected on a big screen at the same time.

After a while we got tired (and thirsty) so we decided to go for a pub-break. We ended up in a pub at the Rembrandt square, which is actually my least favourite square at night (full of police and chavs). But at least the sofas were comfy, the wine was decent and we got to observe some funny people. At around midnight, we arrived at the special collections of the University of Amsterdam that was exhibiting their collection of 16th century cookbooks. They also had the staff of restaurant fifteen cook recipes from them, although we didn’t see or eat anything of that because we ended up at a presentation on the influence of Jewish food on New York today. Afterwards, we were too tired to party and see more (Steve and Vero also had to catch a train to Leiden) so we decided to call it a day.

On Sunday, Paul and I enjoyed a quiet day around Zeeburg. We didn’t have to do anything, so we just wandered around a bit, had coffee at Sissy-Boy (yes, awkward name for a shop for native English speakers) while reading magazines, we checked out some of the other shops on KNSM-eiland (now I know of at least one shop that still sells Levi’s 501 cut for women! They also have great dresses, but a tad expensive). I even worked on my thesis for a couple of hours, and in the evening we watched a few episodes of Californication (incredibly funny).

And now it’s Monday night again, and time for sleep as tomorrow we’ll have another busy day with work and two friends of Paul’s from the US happen to be in the Netherlands so in the evening we’ll meet up with them.

On January 30 I found out that a paper I’d written together with Antal, Sander and Steve got accepted to a workshop at EACL’09. Today I registered for the conference and booked my flights, so from March 28th til April 6th I shall be enjoying sunshine, ouzo and olives (oh and learning a lot from interesting talks of course). Incidentally EACL’2006 in Trento was my first conference on the MITCH project and this is probably going to be my last trip on the MITCH project as my contract ends at the end of August. I also hope that the week in Greece will be a short break after I finish the first complete draft of my thesis. I have a rather long to-do list of things that still need to be done before I have all the content (results and stuff you know) for my thesis, but I’m sure that I’ll get there (that means if I don’t spend too much time blogging, but I just thought I’d tell you guys about yet another trip ;)).

P.S. I’ve never been to Greece so tips on fun stuff, cool restaurants, things to avoid etc are very welcome!

Today I got to talk a bit about my project on Noorderlicht, a weekly show on radio 1 about scientific research in the Netherlands. It was quite fun to go to Hilversum to see the offices of the Dutch broadcasting company and to experience how a radio show is made. I think I did pretty OK, considering I’d never been interviewed before (in fact, I had never expected to have to answer the question why computational linguistics is interesting, I’ve always kind of considered it as a given) and I’m also not really used to talking about my work in Dutch. Thankfully the other interviewee, Prof. Jan Scholtes of Maastricht University, was better prepared for these kind of things and came up with some nice examples. When I grow up I want to be able to talk about my work as clearly as he does!

The only thing I find weird is that my voice sounds so high when I heard it back on the mp3…somehow it seems lower to me normally…

In my previous post I forgot to mention that my professor got a grant for another CATCH project, so Tilburg will continue to contribute to the digitisation of cultural heritage data. Only through this project I found out that there is still so much interesting information around that is just not accessible and may disappear if nothing is done with it.

Also, perhaps even cooler, the CATCH+ project in which our project also features received a grant as well. This means that two software companies are going to take our experimental software that only we know how to run (mainly our stuff for automatic database cleaning) and turn it into a proper software package. I think that’s very cool, in particular because I think it’s important to do useful research and not just research for the sake of research, but within a research project there’s only so much software development one can do, even with the luxury of a programmer on board. So it’s nice to see your research results getting a follow-up.

Although my thesis hasn’t progressed much lately I’ve had many good reasons to not update my blog the past month, since a lot has happened:

• I wrote two papers for two workshops (IWCS-8 and BioDivGrid-08)
• I turned 26, so for the first time I threw a big party in my tiny apartment in Leiden
• in preparation for my birthday I ordered my groceries off ah.nl, very decadent, but necessary due to severe time-constraints
• my parents gave me a Philips Wake-up Light for my birthday, so getting up is easier
• I started reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem
• My sister performed with her dance group (and I watched in awe)
• Paul and I spent a great week together around Leiden and Amsterdam
• while Paul was here the heating in our house broke down
• thankfully we could take a shower at the hotel in Amsterdam where two of his friends were staying
• I visited the Anne Frank house
• I saw Rembrandt’s Nightwatch (was actually a bit disappointed, I guess I’ve been spoilt by the Louvre and the Vatican museums?)
• Paul and I quietly celebrated being together for a year (in different time zones again unfortunately)
• I presented my work at BioDivGrid-08
• I said goodbye to Arthur who’s moved to Skye
• My sister Sara turned 17
• I’ve watched many episodes of “How I Met Your Mother” (my latest little sin)
• We celebrated Sinterklaas at my parents

This is my last post from an extremely hot Urbana (33 centigrade), but it’s also extremely windy so even though you’re getting sunburnt on the fly it feels a little bit cooler. In half an hour I need to be packed and on my way to the train station to catch my bus to Chicago, but I thought I’d give you the last report on the conference from Urbana.

Getting up this morning was not easy, the busy days and few hours of sleep seem to start to take their toll, but I made it to the last sessions nonetheless. I think I know why I keep waking up early now though, it’s party the sun, but most of the time my stomach that wants food. I try to eat roughly the same volumes of food as I do at home (which is not easy with the giant portions) but I just seem to digest it faster… But that hasn’t got much to do with the conference. What has though, is that the first session wasn’t highly relevant or interesting for me, but the poster session again was, as was the second session. In the poster session it was nice to see a project on second life, not directly relevant for my research, but interesting. What was interesting were the posters on TEI (some markup scheme, highly popular in DH) and a project from Brown University to investigate their involvement with slavery, the interesting bit there was that they more or less have the same goals as MITCH and a similar path to get there (handwritten texts -> transcribed texts -> information extraction -> linking information). The only major difference is that they do the information extraction (markup with TEI) manually as they only have about 80 short texts (so no interesting IE techniques to steal there) but there might still be something to learn from the way they set up their information linking system, but I have to read some more stuff about it. It just seemed interesting at first sight. The second session I chose to attend was a UI session and I learnt some interesting stuff there. I was also quite entertained by some of the presenters, so that wasn’t a bad way to end the DH conference at all. The airconditioning in the auditorium wasn’t very pleasant, but I survived.

On the way back to my residence I saw a university campus police car parked in the street, so I asked if I could take a picture (as a proper tourist) and the officer said her car was a bit old so she called a colleague with a newer car if he could come so I could take a proper picture.  Unfortunately, that car was engaged, so I had to do with the old one. But that was such a nice thing to do! The people here are very nice anyway, I definitely had an excellent time in Urbana.

Now I have to start packing. Hopefully I can post from Chicago soon!

Today was the day of my poster presentation at DH 2007, in the first bit of this post this day is described in text, in the second part you’ll find a visual summary of most of the day. The day started like most days here: I woke up at some point (07:00), had some breakfast (a banana and a granola bar) and I walked to the NSCA building. When I was almost there I realised I had forgotten my badge, and since I’m never terribly early, but usually a tad late I of course had no time to go back to the residence. So I decided to go for a handwritten badge on a piece of paper, but the lady at the registration desk said this happened all the time and made me a new badge on the fly :). I put up my poster and went to attend the first session, sitting on the floor, because it was a popular session and I got in late. I also left the session a bit early to get some tea before the poster session. I can say my poster presentation was a success, as I also missed the session after the poster session because people were still asking me questions or telling me of related projects. During the unofficial prolonged poster session I also got to look at my neighbour’s posters, which were all very interesting. I also scored some more tips on what to do in Chicago (I’m going to try to do an architectural boat cruise, how’s that!), links to cool YouTube videos and the latest gossip in DH, I’m starting to like this networking thing :)

I went to Green Street for a quiet lunch and some errands, such as a new toothbrush, as mine, which is only a couple of months old, decided to break and a new bottle of water that hopefully won’t start leaking in my rucksack and give me a wet bum. My lunch consisted of a humongous smoothie, very tasty though, but it took me until well into the next session to finish it (eating fast isn’t good anyway, but it was still a bit odd to have this gigantic cup next to you while listening to a talk). The session after lunch was, to say the least, an interesting new experience to me: feminism. Now, I’m not going to say too much about this, because as I’m a woman blogging I’ll probably get flamed, threatened, and eventually harassed, so I’ll only say that feminism isn’t quite my cup of tea. Please don’t ask me to explain this any further.

The posters during the second coffee break (which was actually a coke/Sprite zero/crisps/disgusting American chocolate /popcorn break) were not quite up my alley, but interesting nonetheless, although some contained lots and lots of text (I suspect the whole abstract). Anyway, I didn’t quite feel like going to the last session, but I’m very happy I did, the session I attended was called “Measure and Meaning” and is I think the most technical session I’ve come across: people talking about algorithms (no formulae or anything though), presenting results and a healthy open-mindedness towards other methods, but perhaps that was also because of the general way of presenting. Especially the second presentation by D. Sculley and Brad Pasanek was extremely entertaining, in a theatrical way they presented together, really together and with a good sense of humour and crazy slides.

After the sessions I relaxed in the grass and sunshine for a little bit, strolled to my residence, did some more relaxing, and then it was time again for the conference dinner. Although I did skip the social hour, which was from 18:00 until 18:45 (not quite an hour indeed) because I was knackered at the end of the sessions (17:30), which I thought pretty understandable, and I didn’t seem to miss out on much. The food at the dinner was pretty OK, the ambiance a bit hmm, let’s say odd. I think dinner was done in about 45 mins. Then there were some announcements from the organisers (inside-jokes and other stuff, mainly leading to applause, yelling and even standing ovations) and then the bluegrass band. Bluegrass music is interesting, but it’s not really background music, so talking became more or less impossible. Hence we (Team Cool) decided to go to “downtown Champaign”. There we found out that downtown Champaign is about 5 pubs. But we found a nice place, Matt decided to drive the nice waitress crazy by first asking what beer they had on draught, and then to ask for a sampler of all beers…a Canadian thing supposedly. Matt and Lev did some serious beer tasting, even grading and writing down which they liked best, while Stan ate a pizza which was cut up very neatly (not sliced) and I drank a huge pineapple margarita (I’m was in a pineapple-mood today). And now I’m back at my residence writing it all up.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN2L_nIIEyU]

I’m not sure if it’s the fact that this is a conference in the US instead of in Europe, or that it’s just me, but I find that the term “weird” would suit this conference. First, I’m not really used to conferences that only require abstracts, but perhaps that’s just to prevent users from having to drag very heavy proceedings with them, because people have enough to tell (some people have less to tell but just seem to like listening to themselves). The first session I attended this morning was to say the least a bit dodgy, or perhaps again that’s just me. It’s just that the session consisted of four talks, about work by the same group of people, all presented by the same group of people…I don’t know, we just submitted one abstract…

At 10:30 I got to experience an American coffee break, which means fatty (and greasy!) food. But the tea was good. The next session was OK, though not very relevant for my research. And then it was already time for lunch! I finally made it to Strawberry Fields, the organic supermarket, although it wasn’t much of a supermarket, but there was good food. I did again get the “she’s crazy”-look from the staff because I’m new to the way orders are handled here. But the food was good, very good.

The first session after the lunch break was interesting, but only because of the extremely bad way in which some of the presentations were delivered. Monotonously enumerating project proposals and ongoing project is just not interesting to listen to. As that session ended early I decided to go outside and sit in the grass and do some skyping with the MfmK, which was pretty cool, until it started to rain. So I picked up James and strolled in, while still talking in Dutch to MfmK, which must have been an interesting sight, although Lisa said she found it rather cute. I did find a Dutch person though, or rather, she found me, because I was speaking Dutch :)

The poster session during the coffee break was very interesting, actually much more interesting than the talks I’d attended so far. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to see all posters, as half an hour is pretty short. This again wasn’t a proper coffee break btw as there wasn’t any coffee or tea but fizzy drinks and peanutbutter granola bars and mars bars instead of biscuits. I talked to an Italian guy who doing statistics on musical scores of differen opera characters to sort of describe their character, or at least their singing. I also saw a poster of an American guy who was looking at narrative aspects of computer games and of a Portuguese guy who is doing something which is quite similar to some of the CATCH projects, although it’s a bit of a combination of MITCH and SCRATCH in one project. The idea is that they have written texts on how boats were built, which were transcribed, and then the terms were extracted and linked to similar terms in different languages, similar, because supposedly there are several boat-building-cultures. There is a link with SCRATCH because they also try to link the written text to the transcribed text, and even link terms to parts of little driagrams inside the written source, so also some image recognition. Quite interesting. During the last ordinary session of the day there was a very interesting presentation by Jan Rybicki who had compared 12 translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by plotting characters on a map by their language usage. His presentation was interesting on several levels:

• he has a very nice presentation style (although I would have presented the diagrams differently)
• I could actually follow it
• there was a description of the approach and results
• some people got really excited (not necessarily in a good way, such as the lady who was venting her discontent with a certain translation of a work by Samuel Beckett, for about 5 minutes…

From 17:30 until 19:00 there was supposed to be another plenary, in which Wilhelm Ott was delivering his Busa Award Lecture and there would be another reception. Strangely enough, we started with the reception (which was mainly leftovers from Monday), and then the plenary started with a presentation in which information about DH2008 was given, including info on how to get there, and the notice that we should book early because flights to Helsinki fill up quickly. Very, very incrowd. Then there was finally the award lecture, which was interesting, but just a bit too long. Around 19:30 everyone was hungry and exhausted, so a whole bunch of humanists swarmed into town to find food. We ended up at Cafe Luna, where we’d wanted to go the day before, and found it open, and crowded. Fortunately they still had a big table outside, so we dined in the street. And it’s probably the best meal of this trip, it’s going to be very, very hard to top that. It’s a kind of tapas place, but the tapas are not traditionally Spanish (unless banana gnocchi are a Spanish traditional dish I didn’t know of). The gnocchi weren’t the best part of the meal, but really, it was excellent, or as Susan Brown put it: worth waiting and shivering for. We finished eating around 22:00 we finished eating, but it took until about 22:30 before we left the restaurant because splitting the bill turned out to be quite a challenge ;)

But it all worked out in the end, and on the way to my residence I stopped for some dessert at the chocolate bar, until it closed at 23:00. Matt and I then continued our conversation on cultural differences between Europe and Canada in the lounge of the Illini Union, where I got more or less kicked out at 0:00, as they were closing the doors, but that was fine as I was pretty knackered anyway.

So after last week’s technical problems, my phone decided to stop sounding its ringtone, which is rather annoying, so I’ve ordered a new one. I could try to get it fixed but after its shower in the Efteling in an unexpected monsoon, and all the dust that has gathered in my bag I think it’s had enough to endure. I’ll try to be more careful with my next one, keep it in a little cover inside my bag and try not to get it wet…

I just checked James’ repair status and he’s been fixed, so now I only need to wait for the call (keep an eye on my phone!) from the shop that I can pick him up (it’s still at the repair centre).  Today I also received a card from my family telling me not to worry about things (after all, it’s only a notebook), which was really sweet. Thanks mum and dad and Sara, Hans and Frank :)

Meanwhile, the machine in Tilburg is driving me crazy! It really doesn’t like browsers which is not helpful if you’re trying to register for conferences. It doesn’t even just not like browsers, it basically dislikes running any application apart from Thunderbird properly, as it also crashed xFig while I was in the middle of drawing something (for my DH poster). So today I left the office early to do some work on Towel, my beloved 4.5 year-old iMac which has never let me down (*knock on wood*).  Pff, technology!

Also today we found out that my brother Hans is allergic to house dust mite, not fun. But he’s a cool dude so I’m sure he won’t let it get him down.

Oh, gotta dash to my jazzdance class now!

On Thursday I couldn’t access my email for most of the day. In the evening I found an email from the IT-Unit saying that my mailclient had probably crashed the mailserver and they’d had parked my emails elsewhere temporarily. Somewhere where I couldn’t access it anyway. I doubt that Apple Mail crashes a mailserver, but just to be on the safe side I’m forwarding all my university mail to gmail now (yes Steve, I know I should have done that ages ago!) so Apple Mail won’t have to communicate with the university mailserver anymore.

On Friday I was happily messing about with LaTeX for the camera ready version of my paper for LaTeCH07. The paper was almost finished, I was just exploring LaTeX’s capabilities of making my formulae display even better, when my HD crashed. It really, really, really crashed. So badly that James did not even recognise that it had a HD. So I spent the afternoon in Amsterdam, first taking James to the Apple Store, where some dude broke the news to me that it’s highly unlikely that they can salvage the data. Alternatively, I could throw a lot of money at a data recovery company, but I decided that that would be taking it a bit too far, and I still have backups of my photos, or know who has (Vero, I need Fuerte!!! Mum, France! Chris, Beetle if I can’t locate the DVD anymore!). I then did a crazy (but pretty funny, if I may say so myself) thing, but more on that next week (perhaps *mysterious grin*). And then I proceeded to H&M’s and Zara for some shopping therapy.

Anyway, back to work now..