Poincaré conjecture, Perelman, Fields Medal

There are a lot of quarrel about how much credit everyone involving to solve Poincaré conjecture should get. But the most important person, Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician, deline which I think is more valuable than Nobel prize.

It shows that the fundemental research still need genius and have genius. Not all the work need to be done through cooperation and fund.

There is good post from MITBBS.com(A chinese forum for people in North American)

It's time to change my own time clock

This new semester, I have the classes beginning around 9:00am every weekday from next week. I cannot believe the summer was over. The time is passing so quickly. Unfortunately, I cannot achieve the goal I set at the beginning of this semester except auditting the class and playing tennis. I really need to push myself hard this semester.

I take two courses: network and graph, financial calculus. Also I am going to audit: real analysis, advanced stochastic process.

But my eagerest goal is to finish two projects on hand so that I can put my time into real research. For my research, I wanna to do more theoritical side than computational side.

There is something I want to get rid of. I am going to shrink my online time. It really wastes my time. To accomplish this target, first not bring my laptop into school unnecessarily, second not open computer after I get up and before I go to bed, third do not go to code unless it is worth doing, fourth don't try to read basketball information everyday especially when new NBA season begins.

At the same time there is something I am going to get used to. Since I am moving to a two bedroom apartment recently, there is a study room for me. I can study home now. Also I get a new mattress, it is so comfort that I hope I can read a paper everyday on the bed before I fall into sleep.

Hopefully, I will increase my ability to manage my time and be more productive. I am during the process of designing a weekly agenda. It needs the balance between work and life. And I am going to fill out my timesheet everyweek as I need to do as an employee. Also I would send my weekly report one day before I meet Larry with detail checklist of what I am doing during the work. I learn it from Wasu. He told me that is really efficient way. I will post the formats of my timesheet and weekly report later. And publish the result of my timesheet and the number of jobs I do every week.

In the ideal situation, this gonna to set my high expectation more likely to achieve.

The connection of EE and SCM

Finally, I found a connection between EE ( my undergraduate major ) and SCM ( my current research interest ).

Yesterday, I call my 4 year roommate at JiaoTong Univ. , who is now at EE@UCSD. I happen to ask whether OR can be applied into his area. Originally, I just want to advocate the usage of OR and provide him a potential tool. It seems no many people use LP, IP, NLP to his area. After I push him think hard, he gave me a very interesting problem in the physical network design. He thinks that using large scale optimization model to solve real time network flow is not his favorite. i.e. he don't like the idea that doing optimization at server level and then telling what the router should do. Instead, he like to solve the problem at the router level and the objective is not far away from the global control.

That's the exact idea of centralized vs decentralized, which is one of the key concept of SCM. But the research on the complex supply network is far from mature. So I cannot give him a plausible method during the phone call.

Also his current internship at Motorola is to implement at heuristics to solve IP at cell phone. Although he uses the different langurage, it seems branch and bound is way to complex for the chip of cell phone.

Anyway, it is always interesting to find the people at different area trying to solve the similar problem.