From Sydney to Canberra
It’s now official. Julieanne, Les and I are moving to Canberra to start our new post-PhD lives. I’ll be taking up a research fellow position in the Statistical Machine Learning group at the ANU while Julieanne will be working within the halls of parliament. Les, with his easily transferrable skills, will earnestly continue his canine duties.
The main reason we’re going is that Julieanne is about to submit her thesis (she’s diligently correcting chapters as I type) and the job opportunities for her in Canberra are far more plentiful - both in academia and politics - than here in Sydney. The decision was sealed when one of her online job searches was cast a little too wide and she found the post-doctoral position that I’ll now be starting on the 15th of August.
My resignation was announced at work today and now I’m gearing up for the dive back into academic life. I feel like I’ve got a taste of what commercial research has to offer as I was working with some really excellent people. It will be sad to leave but I think my new position at the ANU will give me a sense of what an academic career path might be like - something that was difficult to appreciate while working and writing up my thesis.
I was lucky to meet some of the people I’ll be working with (or at least nearby) at this year’s international conference on machine learning. They’re all solid researchers with strong mathematical backgrounds so I’m looking forward to really getting my teeth into some of the more recent theoretical developments in machine learning. I’m also hoping there will be a chance to do some graduate-level teaching as it’s something I’ve been keen to try for some time now.
The wheels are most definitely in motion and this weekend they’ll be driving us down to Our Nation’s Capital for the first of what will hopefully only be a couple of house-hunting visits. We’ve been making good use of AllHomes to help us search for candidate places. By assiduously squinting at tiny photos of houses we have been able to form a shortlist of places that best photograph on digital cameras built in the early 90’s. We’ll be inspecting them to make sure of the little details: that the rooms are indeed connected to one another and that the warping of the floors are due to the fish-eye lens rather than any inherent structural problems.
To those friends who both live in Sydney and read this blog: consider this a heads up about an imminent farewell party. It’d be best if you kept between now and the end of the month free while we decide on a date for the party.
two comments
I told Claude. He reckons you’re going over to the Dark Side. His only hope is that you might take the light of ILP with you and teach it among the heathens.
Malcolm
PS: We have to have that game of Seafarers before you disappear.
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