Lunch with a AAAI Fellow

I had the pleasure of participating the "Lunch with a AAAI Fellow" event yesterday. We were fortunate enough to meet not one but two AAAI Fellows, Dr. Marty Tenenbaum and Dr. Harry G. Barrow. We were taken to a nice seafood restaurant where we had the opportunity to discuss a wide range of topics with the fellows. Both Dr. Tenenbaum and Dr. Barrow were very insightful and a provided a lot of very useful advice about our own research and the research career in general.

I feel very priviledged to have been given this opportunity and I would like to thank Dr. Tenenbaum and Dr. Barrow again for their time and the effort they put into this event.

Favorite talk so far

Granted the conference pretty much just started, my favorite talk so far was Stephen Muggleton's talk on computational biology. I was especially interested in the idea of the robot scientist and using ILP for systems biology. He said that he hoped his talk would provide inspiration in the field, and I thought it did. I really bought in to what he was saying about how it's an exciting time for AI because we can apply our tools to this very interesting domain of biological/chemical research that has tons of data and tons of real world applicability. Anyone else seen a talk they really liked so far?

Some of the pictures that I took around MIT

Building 10

Ashdown (graduate students dorm)


MIT auditorium


Charles River


Another Charles River


The famous dome


East Campus


Green Building


The path near Hayden Libraray


The view from marriott hotel


In front of 77 massachusetts avenue


Stata building



I hope you enjoy the pics!

Hola from Boston

I arrived Boston on Thursday. Stayed 2 nights at the HI-Boston and today moved to the Seaport hotel. If you are already here & would like to hang out tonight - feel free to post a message! Some tips from my stay here:
1. Not all Subway station have the "new payment system". Actually most of them still use tokens so do not buy a card with much credit.
2. It is very easy to get to Seaport and to HI-Boston with the T. Both are less than 2 minutes from Subway stations.
3. Freedom trail is a must. It takes 3-4 hours if you stop for photos (& ice-cream). You can do it yourself. A map with info is available for $2 at the info center (Park station).
4. Nightlife - the area near the Fenway park (home of Red-Sox) is the spot, with lot's of bars and night clubs. Avalon is a nice club. Yesterday the cover was $15. Drinks are quite expensive ($10 for vodka-redbull).
5. HI-Boston is a very nice hostel ith nice people but the rooms are very small.
6. Seaport is great :)

C ya,
Saher

An FYI on taxis from the airport

Just to let people know, when you take a cab from the Logan airport, they add $6.50 in fees to the fare. I found that out firsthand this morning...
We'll see everyone in Boston!

Swapping Volunteer Tasks

Everyone should have received an email notification that the volutneer tasks have been assigned. If you have a time conflict or another reason that doesn't allow you to do your assigned task, you can use the AAAI-06 Student Forum to try and swap tasks with other volunteers. Once both parties have come to an aggreement, the volunteer schedule will be updated.

Seaport Hotel from Logan Airport

For people staying at the Seaport Hotel, it looks like it's really easy to get there from the airport if you take the Subway. You just get on the Silver line at the airport and stay on it until World Trade Center Station.

Here is the MBTA page about the Silver Line and here are directions to the hotel from their webpage.

Volunteer notifications have been sent out

If you submitted a volunteer application for the conference, you should have received your notification. If you haven't, wait a day or two and if you still don't hear from AAAI, you may want to contact them. We will be posting the volunteer schedule on the student site once we have access to it. This will allow people access to the schedule from anywhere rather then just their email.