DONE!!!

It was more than a month ago, but just now I had time to post here the announcement: my PhD thesis defense went very good. I finally got my PhD. It is done!

Tomorrow is the "D" Day

Yep, is tomorrow. The "D" (from defense - PhD thesis defense) day is coming fast. For more info take a look at official announcement.

LaTeX: Keeping capitals in bibliography

The bibtex was removing capital letters from paper reference that I wanted to keep. It took me a little bit to figure out a solution. But I think it might be useful, so I post it below. First I present the original bibtex entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{

(...)
TITLE = "ION Framework - A Simulation Environment for Worlds with Virtual Agent",
(...)
}

The result was:

(...) Ion framework - A simulation environment for worlds with virtual agents (...)

The solution was to add brackets to the field as shown below:


@INPROCEEDINGS{
(...)
TITLE = "{ION Framework - A Simulation Environment for Worlds with Virtual Agent}",
(...)
}

And it worked fine:

(...) ION framework - A simulation environment for worlds with virtual agents (...)

Draft submitted!

Finally the final draft of my PhD thesis was submitted. Now the jury will review it and, based on their comments, I will prepare the final version. If everything runs smoothly, the thesis defense should be in next July.

The importance of a good adviser...

After a long time wandering among several charts to represent some experimental data, I was completely stuck. None depicts the data clearly, neither illustrates the idea I want to transmit. When I was almost giving up and using an awful 3D chart, my adviser comes to see what I was doing, while drinking his after-lunch coffee and in a glimpse just solves my problem. "Do not complicate. Use two 2D charts!" - he said. Obviously he was right. Simple solution.

"Damn! Why didn't I think about that before? "

Anyway, it worked fine and the two charts below express well what I intend.

Shape pool statistics tool

To help me while analysing the behaviour of the shape pool produced by the CAS/HFP decomposition algorithm, I developed a small tool. This tool, whose screenshot is depicted below, compares two shape pools and provides important information about them.

Screenshot of shape pool statistics tool