This blog has lain fallow for more than 2 years. Why is that, and what have I been doing in the meantime?
Well: I wrote much of my dissertation, got a job as an Assistant Professor at Manhattan College, moved across the country, taught for a year while writing my dissertation, tried to defend but was told to fix my dissertation, moved to Eugene for 4 months and rewrote my dissertation over the summer, and defended and got my PhD. This was both stressful and time-consuming, which meant that I neglected this space and retreated into being kind of a lump during the (few) hours I was not working.
My dissertation is titled Measuring the Internet AS Graph and Its Evolution, and I was advised by Professor Andrzej Proskurowski at the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Oregon, and my committee consisted of Professors Art Farley, Jun Li, and Anne van den Nouweland (my outside committee member, from Economics). I’ll properly describe it and post a link to it one of these days, but right now I’m still kind of reeling from the whole experience.
As a new assistant professor in math and computer science I’ve got to get a good start on my research and make sure my classes go well and all sorts of other things. Time management being not my forte, this is all kinds of challenging. However, I anticipate writing a few times a week about various ideas I have about CS education, research ideas, conferences and workshops I am attending, and other things. I may also hand out a few life updates, such as: I got the swine flu! But now I am mostly better.
So, in case you were wondering “What’s up with Peter?”, the answer is that he is very busy enjoying living in New York City with Tracy and teaching Calculus 1 (?) (2 sections), CS 1 (out of John Zelle’s book, but I am thinking that there may be a nice middle ground between Zelle’s book and a media computation approach), and algorithms (out of the wonderful book by Kleinberg and Tardos, which has saved me from having to inflict CLRS on a subsequent generation of students). Now, I will get back to grading. Midterms are coming down the pipe, and it would be immoral to have turned-in-but-ungraded homeworks and give a test on the same material.
