coursing along

Well, I managed to survive the first two days of class, and I think I'll be able to manage for a few weeks at least.

The schedule this term (that means until December) is a pretty solid 10-5 with a one-hour lunch break from Monday to Thursday (we have Friday off completely). Of course, add onto that the group projects and research papers and course work and exam study time (well, exams aren't actually until March, so I've got some time for that) and it turns into a much more demanding task.

Right now, things aren't too bad. So far, it's been pretty introductory; we've had a quick review of basic concurrency concepts (e.g., processes, threads, context switching) and a brief overview of the impetus for computer security along with a discussion about why middleware exists. Also, we've received our first individual project assignment (due in 6 weeks) and were told to start picking groups for a data communications research project, which is made more interesting in that very few of us know anything at all about the topics we'll be covering in class.

Still, it seems like it'll be a rewarding course, even if it is somewhat difficult. My course-mates seem engaged (not too hard on the second day) and competent and generally come across as being almost exactly as intimidated as I feel, which is good. If they were more intimidated I'd feel as though I were missing something, and if they were less I'd feel like an idiot.

I spent some time looking through past projects and dissertations, and many of them seem to involve ad hoc wireless networks, with the more recent ones have to do with mobility (basically, trying to connect a device to an access point while one or both are moving through the coverage). That doesn't mean that's going to be something we have to do, but it seems as though that's where the faculty are steering us (not too surprising, really, given the sorts of projects the Distributed Systems Group at TCD works on)

In any case, I suppose my task now is to figure out exactly what it is I want to get out of this course and start working toward it. I already have some ideas of what I would like to know more about, but these are sort of a mess of potentially unrelated general concepts, like small-world and scale-free networks, models that utilize Bayesian inference such as the Hierarchical Temporal Memory model, self-organizing systems, and even emergence in general.

I think what I'm ultimately after (although I'm not sure how fervently I'll pursue it just yet) is some sort of answer as to what mechanism(s) give rise to complex systems from simple components. That's a pretty tough question, though, so I think I might be satisfied by figuring out some abstract patterns that apply to such systems. I do think that learning more about the structure and properties of communication networks will be very useful in that, and that learning how to produce a distributed application will give me insight into how simple nodes are treated when purposefully constructing a complex system on top of them (although that approach might be a bit to teleological to help in understanding self-organization...)

Anyway, now I'm just sort of blathering so I think this post is over. The main point is that courses have gone well so far, seem likely to go well in the future, and I'm already starting to shift toward academic mode again.