November 2003

Hello friends,

This is the twelfth letter, which means that it is now a year that I am in Toronto. It is a good point to look back what happened in this year. I really learned a lot this year. Objectively, I learned tens of new buzzwords (e.g. POMDP - partially observable markov decision process), read hundreds of papers, and deleted thousands of emails. I attended dozens of talks, some given by famous figures who visited the university (famous in circles where the relative radius is approaching zero). I didn't make a significant progress towards my thesis, except defining an interesting problem. I got a perspective from outside on what is good in Israel, what is bad, and what is bad but is the same as anywhere else ("zarat rabim"). On the one hand, I realized how big the world is. On the other hand, in some sense it is conceptually becoming a small village, where the same standards are enforced everywhere by the commercial sector, the media, and by very similar education systems.

I also had much more fun compared to previous years in the army. For the first time since I remember myself I had free time (as opposed to recharging time). Ph.D. students can do whatever they want to, they have flexible schedule and no Gant. I had time to think, sleep, and clear my mind from background noise. But it wasn't as easy and fun as it may sound from my letters. Psychologically, it is not easy to live alone in a foreign city, even if physically I had everything I needed. The language barrier put me in embarrassing situations (for example, I sometimes explained things in a very awkward way in front of a class just because I didn't know few words or how to put them together). There were all sorts of bureaucracies, such as getting a social insurance number, driving license, taxes and so on that took me literally weeks to deal with. And it takes time to understand how to live in a giant freezer.

One thing I had to adjust to is their calendar. Almost every week there is an important date for some group. Last month they celebrated the Halloween holyday. It is a mixture of traditions originating from the Roman Empire, the Celts, and the Catholic Church. Practically it is similar to "Purim", with emphasize on customs of ghosts, monsters and aliens. I also found it a very interesting case where a specie, in this case the pumpkin, owes its reproduction to someone who cut it in a "scary" way several hundred years ago.

Few weeks before Halloween my supervisor took me to visit Rochester University, in the state of New-York. It was three hours drive in his M5 BMW, which has a graphic map display with GPS guidance (here professors can afford that). Crossing the border to the states was easier than entering the parking of a shopping center in Israel. I didn't leave the car, and they didn't even stamp my passport. In Rochester we looked at their experiments on eye tracking and attention. The subject wears a special virtual reality glasses with a camera that tracks his pupil. The fingers are attached to a robot that applies a force feedback, so the subject can "grab" virtual cubes in the virtual environment and feel the resistance force when he presses them. When the subject doesn't look (they can track this moment), they replace things in the virtual scene, like the colors of some cubes, and see if the subject noticed the change afterwards. For those of you who never saw examples of change and attention blindness, I recommend starting with an image like http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/2001.6/web.html. If you have a fast internet connection, the movies on http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html (especially those with the gradual changes) are worth downloading. Do you notice the changes?


Ady.