Last week I travelled to Brisbane, Australia to attend two workshops, and to present our work on Clustering in Block Markov Chains at a conference called INFORMS-APS 2019. While the fourty-eight hours of travel were excruciatingly tiring (and don't get me started on the jetlag), attending these events was definitely worth it from an academic point of view.
On March 29th, 2019, Pascal Lagerweij defended his MSc thesis Reinforcement Learning in Block Markov Chains. His committee consisted of prof.dr.ir Piet Van Mieghem, dr. Matthijs Spaan, and myself (as daily supervisor). Pascal joined our research group Network Architectures and Services on May 22nd, 2018.
The book Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: Selected letters of Richard P. Feynman, by Richard Feynman and Michelle Feynman, was kindly gifted to me after my promotion. I have finally gotten around to read it, and am sharing my opinion.
This year, I worked to obtain my University Teaching Qualification (UTQ). The UTQ is a proof of didactic competence to teach and supervise at a university. This qualification is recognized nationally: all Dutch universities require all of their lecturers to obtain this qualification. In order to obtain the UTQ, an academic staff member has to complete four modules: UTQ Develop, UTQ Teach, UTQ Assess, and UTQ Supervise.
After presenting my poster at Stochastic Networks 2018 on our manuscript Optimal Clustering Algorithms in Block Markov Chains, I received invitations to present at the machine learning seminars of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, as well as locally here at TU Delft. This post also provides you with our revised manuscript, which contains substantially extended results, as well asmy presentation.
As an assistant professor, one of my new tasks is to teach. Recently, I finished my first teaching session of a Bachelor course for second year students from Electrical Engineering. Specifically, I was tasked with teaching EE2T21 (Part B) - Data Communications Networking.
This week I attended Stochastic Networks 2018, which took place at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) in Edinburgh, Scotland. I presented a poster at this conference, and I was awarded a small prize for it.
We proudly announce NExTWORKx, an intensive research collaboration between Delft University of Technology and Koninklijke KPN N.V. We have formulated a cutting-edge research program that aims to develop first-rate technologies in areas of 5G, blockchain and artificial intelligence. With the collaboration, both parties aspire to further develop the new disruptive technologies that have recently been seeing exponential growth in their application.
Today, I attended the event Your Circular Future at the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen (KHMW). The KHMW is an organization that aims to promote science and bridge a gap between science and society.
We have submitted Optimal Clustering Algorithms in Block Markov Chains, and it is currently under review. This is joint work between myself and Alexandre Proutiere. A preprint is available on arXiv.