Eduardo Valle's Blog » blogging

Am I forgetting anything ?

eduardovalle — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:26:20 +0000

I have just realized : the most important event in my professional life since the Ph.D. viva-voce defense went unannounced in this blog. I have been recently accepted as a faculty member of the Department of Computer Engineering and Industrial Automation (DCA) of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (FEEC) of the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). I am now officially an absent-minded professor.

Balancing a faculty career, with research, teaching and administrative obligations is more challenging than people outside academia usually realize. For the last 5 years, I was exclusively focused on research, so I am rediscovering the thrill of being in a classroom. I am also discovering the painstaking work needed to sustain academic institutions, for, if their horizontal, democratic nature warrants their members many freedoms, they require in return much debate, discussion and politics.

Nevertheless, I am loving every minute of my new duties. I know that the passing years take their toll, but for the moment, at least, I am in my element.

Monteiro Lobato Doodle

eduardovalle — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:51:37 +0000

I’ve coment a while ago on the Viscount of Corncob and his Algebra Congestion (of which I am also a constant sufferer). The Viscount, together with Emilia, the Marquise of Shortail were pictured in the Google Doodle of today’s Brazilian search page. Both are the creation of Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato, whose 129th birthday is commemorated today.

Back to Brazil… and to an old research subject

eduardovalle — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:46:37 +0000

The lack of recent updates has been result of the end of my Research Internship in France, and all the consequent rush in tying up loose ends there, and setting up new projects here. All this international coming back and forth (how much luggage can one reasonably accumulate in four months?!) will end up killing me.

A good piece of news, though: I’ve passed my qualification for maître de conférences (which basically means that the French government considers me apt to be a teacher/researcher).

* * *

I was in Rio de Janeiro for the Carnaval, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet Dr. Eustáquio J. Reis from IPEA (the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economics Research), who is coordinating an interesting project to preserve and diffuse the Memory of Brazilian Statistics, using digitisation and the Web as the main tools.

Before I’ve got interested to the subject of high-dimensional indexing, the long term preservation of digital data (and its use to give access to cultural heritage assets) was my main research interest, as my M.Sc. dissertation reveals. So, it was with pleasure that I revisited the subject at an informal lunch, on the picturesque neighbourhood of Santa Tereza. We browsed important questions like file formats, standards for image acquisitions, search tools, the possibilities (and limitations) of character recognition, and the difficult balance between short term access and long term preservation every project has to achieve.

I am looking forward to see the new developments of this project, which concerns a type of cultural asset which is often overlooked, despite its enormous importance: quantitative data.

A webpage, a blog, one profile here, another there…

eduardovalle — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 19:18:21 +0000

I have too long postponed the creation of this blog : a blog where I can discuss my research, my teaching, my professional experience. Perhaps I was too concentrated on the need to finish that Ph.D. — and to publish those papers ! — but it seems that now the academic world has been swept by a fever that formerly only affected my younger sister and their peers. But instead of Facebook or MySpace, researchers worldwide are putting their profiles on linked.in or on academia.edu. And instead of exchanging songs on last.fm, they are trading citations on CiteULike.

“Web 2.0? This is sooo last week!” I can see from here the Ph.D. freshmen rolling their eyes.

Now I still need to publish those papers — and to catch up with the fad!