Thursday is a long, long day.

Morning: Geometric Algorithms exercise, went through solutions to various convex-hull related things, a bunch of proofs and time and space complexity proofs and correctness proofs, nothing special. Also learned a nifty way of combining different algorithms to yield better worst-case complexities.

Afterwards, Machine Translation, more linguistics. Syntax, how to formally encode syntax and semantics using various approaches, and how these are or were used in machine translation, and afterwards basic word-to-word translation with word alignment, the earliest form of machine translation.

Had food at the cafeteria, where I met some friends.

Afternoon: Multilingual Man-Machine Communication. Sound generation and perception in humans. I already knew some of these things from EMT education. This was more focussed on speech, though, and we also did IPA and the vowel triangle.

Afterwards, Compilers. Parse trees, LL(1) grammars, LL and LR parsers as realized by table controlled stack automata.

Finally, Japanese. Various potential forms. Hooray.

Went home and internetted and got started on various worksheets. Oh man, 11 hours from leaving house to getting back home every thursday, aaaaaaaaaaa.

Overslept and really did nothing but make some cookies. They are good though.

Morning: Geometric Algorithms. Sweepline all-pairs line intersection. I actually knew this algorithm already, so it was nothing new for me, but the proof of its run time was fairly interesting, using a reinterpretation of the problem as a planar graph. After that, went to eat at cafeteria and did vocab.

Afternoon: First, Multilingual Man Machine Communication. Learned about various problems in speech recognition and how humans manage to solve them easily while machines struggle somewhat. Afterwards, Machine Translation. Learned about the basic different approaches to machine translation (Rule-based, Example-based, via interlingua or not, Statistical…) and then about basic systematic linguistics.

Went home, got wet a lot because I got caught up in a hailstorm. Did a lot of nothing and then worked on compiler worksheet for next week a bit, and rearranged teas.

Morning: “Speech to Speech Translation” Seminar kick-off meeting. I initially didn’t plan on doing a Seminar this Semester, but due to various scheduling conflicts dropping Curves and Planes in CAD and instead focussing more on cognitive systems ended up being the more advantageous combination. Thankfully, I caught wind of this seminar starting in week 2, and it wasn’t overly full, so I managed to get in. My topic is “Text Segmentation”, which sounds interesting and fairly hands-on.

After the changes, my schedule now looks like this. I have a total of 30 ECTS points in there, which is the ~expected~ amount - not sure if I can pull all of it, but I’ll damn well try.

After the Seminar, went to Compilers Exercise. We went through the things from the first worksheet, basically just introduction, some examples of programming languages using various technologies and for various domains, and a short repetition of finite automata and regular expressions (regex to automaton, powerset construction, minimization) in the context of lexing.

Had lunch at the cafeteria.

Afternoon: Bachelor thesis advisor sent mail to see him about the presentation in 2 weeks, and since we both had time after lunch, went to see him. Talked about what to focus on in the presentation.

Went home, did some reading for Geometric Algorithms. Waited for the worksheet for Compilers to appear, which did not happen. Practiced Japanese for a bit.

Basically, no daily routing, so no posts.

Now, the first week of semester is over, and I’ll start posting again.

Visiting dad in hospital and Skyrim. Hooray.

Worked on paper, then kind of dropped dead after that was done. Okay. Now I should probably start studying for my exams.

Morning: Handed in thesis. Got some bureaucracy done, set up for some more.

Afternoon: Relaxed. Video games.

Morning: Slept in a bit because I was up late the day before. Then worked on scene for paper again.

Afternoon: Finished up scene for paper. Hooray!

Morning: Finally went to print thesis! Then had food and went to see parents.

Afternoon: Worked on a scene for paper.