I just ran into two nice packages rJava and JRI that allow running R code from Java and Java code from R. The packages are developed by Department of Computer Oriented Statistics and Data Analysis at Universität Augsburg. It just makes my life much easier. If you need scientific computing from Java it is a really nice option to try :D.

The Great Pumpkin Patch is a seasonal attraction in Arthur, IL (just 40 minutes drive from Urbana). You can find all sorts of pumpkins and Halloween-oriented decorations. The gift shop is culturally interesting, and the home bakery has a wide variety of angel cakes (really soft and nice looking). The Great Pumpkin Patch also has one of the 1900s rural one-room classroom schools—there was at least one school in a 2 miles reach of any farm in Illinois. Children of all ages were sharing one class and teacher, definitely a pedagogical challenge. If you are around, it is a must stop place before it closes its doors till next year. ...

September 21 I was invited to give a talk at the Computer Science Department at UIUC. During the talk “Combating User Fatigue and Contradictions in Subjective-based Optimization Schemes” I reviewed some of the research I have been involved about active interactive genetic algorithms. The PDF of the presentation can be downloaded here. I also gave the same presentation to some of the members of the ASAP research group at the University of Nottingham. Natalio Krasnogor invited me for a visit. The main topic was latest advances on Pittsburgh LCS (Jaume Bacardit is working there on protein folding problems using Pitt-style LCS). I really enjoyed interact with people there—lots of challenges and interesting discussions. Oh, I almost forgot, the three days I was in Nottingham I saw the sun most of the day :). ...

Recently I have been working on a data-mining problem that requires supervised learning. The problem is not supposed to be big, just a few hundreds of features. The interesting issue is the number of records, around half a million or more. Most of the implementations of supervised learning algorithms available on the web are not designed with such a volume of data. Scalability of the algorithms becomes a clear issue when dealing such a volume of data. For instance, algorithms that scale as n^3 with respect to the data may become prohibitively costly for any feasible approach. Also, algorithms that require global processing, defeating efficient parallelization may not be an option either. For such reasons, I started working last fall on efficient implementations of GBML algorithms focusing on (1) efficient implementations hacking the available hardware, (2) minimizing memory food prints required, and (3) massively exploiting the inherent parallelism of such methods. A few initial steps can be found here and here. ...

I have been using Kowari for a while. I am quite happy with it, but I am planning to ditch it in favor of the new release of Mulgara (Open Source for of Kowari) lead by Paul Gearon. If you haven’t check it out yet, take a look at it because is more than worth it. I have also been exploring other options. There is modified implementation of SPARQL for MySQL maintained by Eric Prud’hommeaux, his approach is very interesting one if you rely on MySQL server, it is a must. You can find some of his related papers and presentations and here. The last one I ran into recently is the RDF store implementation by Oracle Spatial. I have not played with it much, but it has Oracle behind, and that is a big name… ...