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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2015 - 19:51 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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Return From Hiatus

I think I passed the oral defence Monday morning. In a way, it was kind of underwhelming - no angelic choir after the customary handshakes and congratulations from the committee members, for one - but in all honesty, it wasn't all too bad for what it actually amounts to: "Yay, you made it to the next starting line! Don't spend too long tying your shoelaces, it's probably not gonna get easier, heh."

But, as pieces of paper go, this was kinda satisfying. Realistically, it won't be the last hoop to jump through, but it's a relief to get this particular chapter wrapped up - to any who're thinking of going down this road, please bear in mind that the dissertation isn't the end-all. Sure, it's got to be decent, but if you're staying in academia, it's unlikely to be one's best work, and if you're not... well, might as well put the foot down without incurring too much of a delay.

And as to the point of it all, I'd like to enlist the help of Mr. Ham...

Mr. Ham: Ready and waiting, O pouchless primate.

Me: *passes piece of paper* Here, effect a hunchbacked posture, put on this slightly tattered lab coat and apply these select fake scars, and read this with a lisp.

Mr. Ham: Herr Doktor Human, eet iz all prepared.

Me: *rubs hands together* Excellent.

*long silence*

Mr. Ham: That's it?

Me: Yeah, that's it.

Mr. Ham: You make some poor life decisions, human.

Me: *flattens hamster* You and me both, Mr. Ham. Now go set up the audio, there's a travel report to put up.


Italy 2015

Mr. Ham: *flicks through albums* Why is a hamster of my stature stuck doing this saikang? I suppose this will do...


From the coast of Ipanema, to the island of Capri/
all the way to Kuala Lumpur... (two out of three ain't that bad)


Me: Right. Okay. So, to summarize, this was my conference for the year, which entailed the usual searching for budget flights to the venue, which in this case turned out to be Turkish Airlines, with a stopover in Istanbul. Since I'd already been to the Campania region of Italy (specifically Naples), I figured that a couple of diversions were in order, and went for an extended layover in Turkey, alongside a couple of days on fabled Capri (a short ferry ride from Naples)

But official business first. I had picked up an Osprey Farpoint 70 for this, after being less than impressed with wheeled suitcases on previous travels - yes, they can be fine on level roads, but are horrendous when faced with anything trickier. I'll just say that I never had cause to regret my choice during this trip, with the pack distributing weight nicely on the hips.

As for the flight, the Singapore-Istanbul leg was packed, leaving me without the option of an aisle seat (I'm done with windows for now). The in-flight entertainment system was better than expected for the price, fortunately, and after sitting through precious little actual taichi in Man of Tai Chi, I understood why Kingsman came so highly recommended by my cousin - not many James Bonds can hold a candle to this finely-aged Darcy's all-around suaveness as Galahad - and definitely, his skill with a brolly. I don't think I've ever said this about a movie, but I'm in for the sequel.


The refreshments earned the Mr. Ham stamp of approval


Knocked off for a few hours after that, woke up with a slight cramp in my left leg, before deciding to try Ant-Man. Twas okay. My aisle neighbour caught a glimpse of my boarding pass as we prepared to disembark, and commented that he was headed for Naples too. Turned out that he was headed for the same conference. Then again, this is probably less than a coincidence than it might appear.

Picked up Jared Diamond's (who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel) Collapse during the four-hour stopover in Istanbul, then a short and uneventful connecting flight, at which the passengers duly ignored the yellow lines at immigration upon arrival. Ah, definitely Naples. Alibus from airport to train station (with the stop actually located some distance away), and then the 1325 train to Salerno. Astonishingly, despite there being only maybe seven passengers in the fifty-man cabin, my designated seat had been occupied. Not that I minded that much, it was delightful just to be in countries that have the decency to install air-conditioning outdoors, but still.

Anyway, I had decided on a little hike for this stage - having looked it up on Google Maps, it was foolproof: from the Salerno train station, make for the shore, then walk a few kilometres with the sea on the left side. I figured that it would take an hour at most, and make for some refreshing exercise. The first half wasn't bad at all - Salerno has a very well-maintained waterfront, if punctuated every twenty metres or so by street vendors hawking the same few types of wares. Then, a container port. Eh, that wasn't in the map, but no biggie, just stick to the course, ten kilograms is next to nothing. Eventually, I hit the bend in the coast, which meant that the hotel should be maybe fifty metres inland...


I knew I should have packed the pitons and ropes


Well, it was, just that it was also maybe another fifty metres up a sheer cliff. But, but, with the beach as a selling point, they had to have a means of access from sea level? Oh, elevator's under construction, despite the advice of a well-meaning port security guard. Fine, fine, I'll catch the bus. Availed myself of the help of a nice middle-aged lady with a dog for the right bus-stop, and the driver refused payment upon boarding too. That's some Neopolitan hospitality (I'm not sure how many locals actually got tickets, though)!

Arrived at the hotel about five, just as dusk was falling, and descended a few floors to my room. I'll be enjoying this part at least, given that my lodgings at previous conferences were situated a fair way from the convention location itself. Waking up wasn't a problem, but being able to manage a shower in between sessions was much welcome.


Conference Overview

Those working notes always made more sense when I was jotting them down; but then, it's probably pointless to attempt to skim even the few dozen presentations I sat in on, much less all of the hundred-over works, so I'll just pick out several of the more... accessible? ones, while skimming broadly.

To begin with, the first keynote speaker gave a timely reminder of the holy grail of artificial intelligence - for all the recent advances and hoohah in image classification over thousands of classes, this is but a tiny component of actual "true" A.I., which in the case of the "baby robots" they're experimenting with, encompasses not only computer science and robotics, but fields as diverse as ethology, neuroscience, child psychology, cognitive psychology and linguistics.

Among the takeaways was that spatial cues are important in the learning process of children. It has been observed that people retain more when presented with content in the same classroom, or even font, and this appears to extend even to the posture of the parent. I'm guessing that this bit was reverse-engineered into the actual robots. In particular, gestures were held to be effective in learning to count (see for example Section 4.5 of Ruciński's thesis), with MFCCs incorporated in recent work (including learning internal representations of finger sequences - see Figure 5)

Category learning, which I suppose is a large part of classification, was also touched upon. Very simply put, imagine that a child with no knowledge of fruit is presented with a red apple, a red pear, a green apple, and a green pear. It would hardly be immediately obvious that "appleness" arises more from shape than colour, if the red apple is used to teach the concept of "apple". This is, of course, a very general problem, that I'll try to address further in a future post.


Hamsters, overlooked again
[N.B. Actually, gavagai is Quine's classic indeterminacy of reference example]


Next up, there was a work on detecting community structure (i.e. clusterings) for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which recall has had its day(s) in The State's Times forum recently. Apparently, over 90% of Canadians will try TCM at least once in their life, a fair bit more than I would have guessed, but hardly impossible given that I would spot a medical hall in central Naples soon afterwards.

The presenter went on to distinguish between Western medicine as considering the human body as a machine composed of different parts, and viewed at various levels, e.g. anatomic, biochemical, genetic etc, while TCM sees it holistically as a dynamic system of energy and functions, i.e. 阴阳气血脏腑等, with diseases then being "disharmony" within the system. It was admitted that differentiation and diagnosis could be highly subjective.

This session saw one of the more... pointed cross-examinations that I would encounter through the conference, which I'd suspect being at least partly down to the questioner being unconvinced of the validity of TCM itself. It should be noted that the work is part of a drive towards properly systematizing and scrutinizing TCM knowledge, which I would say is praiseworthy. Personally, without better documented proof, I'd consider TCM as at most as supplementary tonics - 鸡精 and 羚羊 are all very fine every so often, but if I get an infection, I'd much prefer cefpodoxime if possible, thank you.

[N.B. Supposedly, Singapore's the world's healthiest nation.]

Stepping back a bit, it might be interesting to consider TCM from a cultural perspective. For one, a common defence of TCM is that it has a "history of thousands of years"... which means that it can't be all that wrong, right? Now, it is possible to observe that ancient Western medicine actually bears more than superficial similarity to TCM - Hippocratic humorism circa 400 B.C., for instance, centers around such holistic concepts as 血肝脾痰, which may not be entirely surprising as they likely borrowed from the same roots.


5000 years of cultural history. You lose.
(Source: commons.wikipedia.org)


I suppose it is fair to state that next to nobody in mainstream (Western) medicine has taken humorist theory and the like seriously for a couple of centuries, having isolated and analysed the underlying active components - and perhaps more importantly, there's little call to examine procedures such as bleeding with leeches due to some combination of belonging and ethnic pride. While human societies are perhaps not that dispartite, I consider Chinese/Confucian culture as leaning a tad too much towards venerating the past.

There are various more in-depth commentaries on this, arguing that over-respecting forebears (and their way of doing things) and an over-emphasis on "rites" and "established order" has stymied East Asian innovation. Basically, "it has always been done this way" and "don't break the mold" is relatively stronger in Asian societies. Definitely, it's not as if this doesn't happen in the West either... but whatever relative difference there is has probably mostly resulted in the gulf in technological achievement in recent centuries (which, to be fair, is a small portion of Chinese history)

Very crudely put, the difference is between "our ancestors did it this way → we respect our ancestors → what they did must thus be good, moreover trying to put yourself on top of your forebears is unbecoming", and "our ancestors did it this way → we respect our ancestors → but what does this have to do with what they did being good or not? Hell, we can do it better!"

從使尊重师门, 也该现实点吧, 别在乎面子问题.

[N.B. Again personally, if we do become spirits after death, and my descendants were coming up with this "Oh Ancestor Lumber One" bullshit, I'd probably haunt them for idiocy]

Moving on, there was an interesting work on playing Settlers of Catan (I'm still at about 35% on Saint Petersburg four-player), or at least the resource trading portion, that however doesn't appear to consider board state yet. Of course, deep learning should be attractive here, having been applied to Go. Then there was a prizewinning paper on quantifying semantic information conveyed by gestures, that seems to indicate that visual only recall beats auditory only, more ensemble investigations than I managed to drop in on, a more equitable solution to the stable marriage problem, and getting to know of the concept of feature drift.

Also made a point to sit in on some constraint satisfaction sessions, which is touted as one of the strengths of this particular conference, but it's really not my field.

Presentation-wise, I like to think that I'm slowly improving, and fortunately my first tryout at session chair was made easier by having sat through a flight with one of the other speakers already (yes, it was him). To be frank, the social banquet remained a bit... overstimulating (all my fault), but it was a pretty cosmopolitan table - a Vietnamese, a couple of Finns (with obligatory weather opener), a few Turks (I think), a Portuguese, and several from a Dutch university.


Capri

The three days were over quickly, and it was back by bus to Salerno. A group of Chinese students apparently determined that I was tailing them (I actually wasn't), and after a hearty 同学, informed me that they were going to tour the city for a bit, and that the train station was over there. Well, still appreciated. Having made some on-the-fly updates to my itinerary, I made straight for Molo Beverello (formerly hosting the U.S. Sixth Fleet, for military buffs), and got on the first available ferry to Capri.

So, a bit of motivation here - why Capri? For one, it's pretty:


This is heavily underselling it


And, Capri has had the connotation of "getting away from it all", since at least the time of the Roman Empire - one of the highlights of its history was being the administrative centre of the Empire for a decade after Tiberius fell prey to its charms, which perhaps also began its association with more... creative lifestyles. The exclusivity quotient may have dipped slightly these days, but it certainly hasn't lost its association with high living at all - if the many pleasure craft aren't clue enough, a quick stroll will reveal more luxury boutiques than one can shake a titanium-edged Visa Black Card at.

Like, what's the point of buying a private jet online, or (gasp) settling for lifetime frequent flier miles?! That's not done!

But, as a struggling graduate student, it didn't seem proper to spring for actual top-end hotels yet, and I had instead booked a nice family-run B&B (which still about doubled the rates of lodgings on the mainland in the tourist off-season, which should give an idea of the price levels). It was easy to understand why Google Maps didn't try to provide details, after navigating winding hillside passages to get there. The landlady was very helpful, going over the major attractions with a complimentary map (unlike certain other hosts, *ahem*, just joking) and a two-litre bottle of water.

The point wasn't to be cooped up in the room, of course, and I headed down to Marina Grande for a ham & cheese omelette, before taking the funicular up to Capri town proper. Imagine a picturesque Italian village melding with a bloody atas shopping mall, and you'd not be too far off. Since I wasn't exactly looking for sharkskin patent leather pantaloon clasps, the attraction they had was limited, and I began hauling ass. Not to mention, many of the stores were shut for the off-season - which more than makes up for it by the lack of crowding and cooler temperatures - anyway.

Wikipedia has it that there are no cars on the main part of Capri, but what this actually means is that there are many municipal streets that won't fit one - on the main roads, it's traffic as per normal. It's an experience to trek along the long and invariably pristine streets, however - private villa after private villa, invariably bounded by stone walls ranging from waist to head height presumbly depending on the assuredness of their owners, with grocery stores and craft outlets peppered randomly about for variety.


An example of the distinctive nameplate style of the island


Anyway, my first destination was the Certosa di San Giacoma, a Carthusian monastery, which... turned out to be closed, and with its own guard (this had Mr. Ham raving about a "Carthusian conspiracy", but you know how it is with him). Wandered in the Giardini di Augusto for a while, then moved on to the Belvedere di Tragara, before trying to hotfoot it to Villa Jovis, seat of Tiberius. Unfortunately, it wasn't open by the time I arrived either, but on the bright side, Capri's streets are adequately illuminated.

Day two started with a round-island cruise at 10:30 a.m. - note that hanging about the waterfront will result in numerous enquiries as to whether you might "want a boat", which given the overall atmosphere, might well have been an invitation to purchase one. On the off-chance that you're not after a new yacht, I'd recommend the 18 Euro tour with Blue Grotto visit.

Despite the advertised route, we headed for the grotto first, perhaps due to the tides - the grotto entrance is not exactly large, and probably easily closed during high tide. How this works is the ferry stops somewhere in front of the grotto, upon which enterprising boatmen swarm the mothership to pick up customers (at 13 Euros plus a more or less obligatory tip - hey, the boatmen need stakes for their card game on the ticketing boat - easily more than the rest of the tour)

Then, having loaded up with up to four passengers in whatever configuration, the boatmen will row up to the hole in the cliff, haul the boat in with the help of a chain slung along the walls, and then burst into song. To be frank, as tends to be my experience, it wasn't all I expected it to be, but yes, certainly very blue inside. I'd say it's worth trying once. Got asked by a fellow passenger if it was claustrophobic. Well, not exactly, once you get past the entrance.

After everybody that wanted had had their turn, the main tour continued, with stops by several other differently-coloured and rather less-famous grottoes, and information on prominent sights, such as Armani's purported villa (which may or may not be true). Sailed through the Faraglioni rocks midway (a traditional spot to exchange kisses with loved ones), which was about the time that the guide cranked it up, pointing out a (sort-of secluded) "love beach" ("two go in, three come out"). The narrative then took a turn when he informed us that the next cliff was a favourite divorce spot ("easy, fast and cheap!"), and then let us in on why the Boy of Capri statue was so ebulliently joyful ("he's not married!")



[N.B. The boat captain asked me if I was Japanese at one point, which was a reasonable call given that I happened to have one of my souvenir tees from Tokyo on, and that the majority of the Asian day-trippers looked to be Japanese.

This did make me wonder: personally, I think I can distinguish between say Chinese, Japanese and Korean with reasonable accuracy from sight alone, despite them perhaps being all "Asian". I'd gather that Europeans would likewise be able to tell maybe Greeks (who at least some natives of Capri are descended from), Italians, Brits and Scandinavians apart, and Africans Somali, Oromo, Zulu etc. With enough training images, I suppose defining "traits" might be isolable.]

Tried conquering the Phoenician Steps in time for lunch in Anacapri immediately afterwards, but my blood glucose levels disagreed, and I figured after getting maybe a quarter of the way that some risotto would be required. After that, I figured that the bus service could do with some support, and spent the afternoon walking about the area. Anacapri has a bunch of facilities despite having "just" 5000 inhabitants, including a tennis club, nightclub and movie theatre - and, being an island of art, even their Starbucks are edgier.

Ended the day nibbling on a hotdog and sipping Coke at the funicular cafe, as the sun set over Capri. I mean, it's a holiday, should I be out to score "I wuz there" points as if I were geocaching?


Naples II


More of the diaspora


Bade farewell to the landlady early next morning, and caught the 0810 ferry back to Naples just in time. Felt confident enough to walk from the port to the train station, which was right next to my next place of lodging. The ramshackle outer door didn't promise much, but once I got let in, I was greeted by a thoroughly modern lift, and then the most modern room I had seen in Italy up until then. It so happens that this particular B&B had just opened a few months ago.

In fact, the room was so comfy (and the shower so pleasing) that I was greatly tempted to just stay in, but eh. In the end, I went down Via dei Tribunali at my leisure, while sampling whatever pizza caught my fancy, because Naples. I soon had more cause to avail myself of Neapolitan hospitality after coming down with a stomachache. Few gestures can be as heartfelt as the offering of tissue paper when confronted with an unstocked washroom. Thanks, stranger.

Made it a point to head for Herculaneum the next day, after skipping out of Pompeii on my grad trip, and it turned out that the site was right down the street from its namesake Circumvesuviana station. What struck me more than the ruins themselves, was their juxtaposition with modernity:


Where does the past end?


Snagged copies of The Pope and Mussolini and China Rich Girlfriend at the rail station bookstore about this time. Also spotted more than a few Italian soldiers in full combat fatigues patrolling about, which I only later realised might have been due to the Paris attacks, which deserves some digression on.

My first thought on the attack was - eh, isn't this more or less the plot of The Teeth of the Tiger (panned as it was?) - terrorists hire cars, smuggle in small arms and presumably homemade explosives, and strike multiple crowded areas near-simultaneously? Then again, this is maybe the most obvious terrorist modus operandi, which may not say much.

The responses were predictable: after the initial outpouring of sympathy and explosion in French flag overlay filters on Facebook, it whiplashed into some of the most virulent anti-(radical) Muslim and (Muslim "Syrian") immigration fever that I've encountered in some time. Not only is Merkel wavering, but in the surest sign of how strong anti-immigration sentiments are getting, even the Swedes are starting to say that they will have to cut back very soon.

In defence of this view, it is probably true that many - perhaps the majority - of supposed Syrian refugees aren't actually Syrian or even properly refugees, and are instead assorted economic migrants posing as refugees. This is by itself maybe not so bad, but there is a second major accusation: that refugees are unwilling to integrate into the mostly-secular European democracies they are banging on the doors on, and are instead intent on transplanting (*cough* Islamic *cough*) values from the very places that they are trying to escape... and why ain't the Gulf states taking any of their bros?

A concurrent drive in response to the terrorist attacks has been towards banning, or at least weakening, encryption... only for the authorities to admit that (most of) the communication between them was over plaintext SMS ("eh ahmed boom boom?"/"akbar"), which causes this argument to fall flat. In any case, if governments haven't yet noticed, end-to-end encryption is becoming ubiquitous.

Reddit for one has joined the trend towards encrypting the entire Internet by default, which represents a massive shift in power away from sovereign states to corporations. While I'm sure that Big Business aren't exactly angels, this decentralisation of power is certainly something I can live with. Ideally, repressive governments will face the prospect of either being completely hamstrung by information starvation, or alternatively allowing citizens access - which translates automatically to unfettered and uncensored access. This might not save North Korea, but prospects elsewhere are rosier.

And for now, with Turkey (trying to) block Reddit, there's always VPNs...



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