It’s time for another review of my current toolkit!

With a new job and a new city, I needed to re-assemble my work computing setup from scratch and am now running MacBooks both at home and work, so there are a number of changes. I also completely overhauled our home network. Quite a few software things have stayed the same, though.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that parallel computing on Python is an experience that ranks somewhere alongside “facial exfoliation with a rusted cheese grater” in its pleasantness.

In this post I’m going to briefly review our particular (common!) problem, the state of multiprocessing in Python, and why it unfortunately appears necessary to continue using my own parallel processing layer in LensKit.

There are a number of steps in preparing the final (or “camera-ready”) version of a paper for publication. This post attempts to document them. Many of these points are about making the paper consistent with itself, so that it doesn’t look sloppy. This list probably isn’t complete, but hopefully it’s a helpful start.

Things change. Seasons end, and new ones emerge.

In 2016, I joined Boise State University, and founded the People and Information Research Team with Sole Pera. This was the first (only?) multi-PI research group in the department, and one of a very small number of multi-PI recommender systems groups in the US.

A few years ago, I posted annual reviews of what I did in the year; thought that this year I might bring that tradition back.

This year has been a year of some major achievements and changes. I earned tenure, published a major piece of integrative scholarship that I’ve been working on for a few years, and one of my Ph.D students successfully defended her proposal.

I’m also working on figuring out what the next phase of structure and operation looks like for my research lab, since Sole Pera moved to Delft. I’m thrilled she got this new position! It’s been a very good 6 years building the PIReTs and having other academic adventures with her, and we continue to work together remotely on various things. For now, she’s been continuing to meet with the research group while some of the current students finish and we figure out what the long-term future of the PIReT ship will be.