Week 12

Kevin, Pragnya, Wendy and I celebrated Easter Monday with Laura’s family and had a lot of fun! I loved the Easter hunt! We had roast lamb for dinner and played board games; my favorite was the Mind!

I got back my Research Proposal feedback from Julian. I met with him for a discussion and during it, realized how I haven’t been reading research papers. This is why my current proposal lacks any research aspect and has zero impact. It’s a reimplementation of what has already been done. I got very excited and wrote a tree-walk interpreter but maybe I should have spent that time reading more literature. Maybe not, because I feel a lot more confident about the compiler pipeline and can understand the research papers better.

I have been reading quite a lot for the past few days and hope to have an improved research direction. I am meeting with Julian again in 5 days.

I had a great meeting with Marylou who helped me understand how to find good research papers. My big takeaways are:

• Use advanced search to combine keywords
• Sort by most cited first
• Use a reference management system

She showed me EndNote to manage resources and it looks great! Laura uses it as well. EndNote doesn’t have a Linux client however. And it feels very enterprisey. For now I have settled on Zotero which is open-source, has a Linux client, and connects to Overleaf! The Overleaf plugin is powerful. I can have all my references in Zotero, and search them in Overleaf when I \citep.

I liked this week’s material in Cryptography about Diffie-Hellman and the discrete log problem.

The lamps came from IKEA and they’re wonderful. No more bright lights in the evening!