Michael Ekstrand's blog.
Keeping records of academic activity and effort, as you go, makes it easier to prepare review materials and to understand your activity and performance. Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons . In a previous post, I wrote about keeping an academic portfolio to maintain current records and evidence files of academic work and output. In this post, I want to describe another element I have added to…
Photo by Anton Savinov on Unsplash Goodbye 2025! This has not been an easy year for fairly obvious reasons, and I’m not feeling as reflective at the end of the year as I sometimes am, but I’ll try to provide at least some of my usual year-end reporting. The core of my toolset is pretty stable from 2023 and 2024 : still in the Apple ecosystem for endpoints, and a lot of the major infrastructural…
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash Ph.D. admissions committees, faculty search committees, etc. need to review dozens to hundreds of applications for a limited number of positions, and need to do so in a way that gives each applicant a fair review and keeps committee workloads manageable. The way we’ve done this in a couple of committees I’ve been on is to implement two-stage review: each…
Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash . Effectively computing non-personalized recommendations can be annoyingly subtle. If we do naïve things like sorting by average rating, we get a top- N list dominated by items that one user really liked. Sorting by overall popularity doesn’t have this problem; as soon as we want contextual related-product recommendations, however (e.g. “people who bought this…
In my end-of-year blogging, I usually provide an update on my toolbox , and a review of the year. So what’s happened? A quick (and likely incomplete) summary… Taught recommender systems (DSCI 641) for the first time at Drexel. Taught 2 terms (spring and fall 2024) of INFO 659 (Intro to Data Analytics), revising material and pacing in the second offering. Proposed a new class for AY2025–2026 on…
Photo by Philip Swinburn on Unsplash . It’s that time of year again! Since I did a relatively full reset last year , for this year’s State of the Tools I’ll focus on changes and a few highlights. My Zoom studio post discusses my hardware and software for video recording in more detail. Hardware My core hardware is the same as year; there are a few tweaks or additions: Bought a modern gaming rig at…
Photo by Zalfa Imani on Unsplash Inspired by Alan Said & Sole Pera’s posts on LinkedIn, here’s a quick summary of where you can find me and/or my work at RecSys next week in Bar, Italy: On Monday, I will be at the 7th FAccTRec Workshop I am co-organizing with Toshihiro Kamishima, Karlijn Dinnessen, and Amifa Raj. In the Tuesday poster session, Christine Bauer, Andrés Ferraro, and I have a short…
Photo by Jordan McDonald on Unsplash There are more intervention strategies in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — Hamlet, sort-of Tomorrow, I will be presenting our paper in the IR4Good track at ECIR 2024 on strategic IR impact interventions . From my side, this paper grew out of a couple of things: Resonance between what I am trying to accomplish by working on…
I often get comments, and sometimes questions, about my Zoom and video lecture setup in my office. In this post, I want to talk a bit about it, my choice of equipment, and things that can improve the quality of video recordings, remote teaching, and videoconferences. There are a few key pieces to this: Audio quality (microphone) Video quality (camera) Lighting Software Headphones and Monitors…
Photo by Vertex Designs on Unsplash I’ve often closed out the year with two blog posts: my tool report , and a year-in-review. It’s been a pretty full year! One of the major accomplishments was moving to Philadelphia to take a new position in the information science department at Drexel University 1 . I’m very excited for the coming years here, as the interdisciplinary information science context…
Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash 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. Endpoints I’m now…
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash TLDR: LensKit is going to keep using a custom layer on top of Python’s ProcessPoolExecutor , but moving that out into a separate package. 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…
Photo by Cedric Verstraete on Unsplash 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. Proofreading Correct errors noted in…
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. In our 7-year run, we’ve graduated (or will soon graduate) about 20 students, published…
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash 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…
Photo by Cesar Carlevarino Aragon on Unsplash It’s time for this year’s State of the Tools . Things are a bit in flux this year, as I’m working on transitioning my endpoints from Windows to macOS, but I’ll run down where I’m at and where I’m headed; there have also been substantial changes in our personal computing infrastructure. Hardware & OS Organizing these posts can be a bit random, so let’s…
I’m starting to do some speaking again, and now that Japan has opened back up for travel, I’m very pleased to be giving a couple of talks later this month: On November 19, I will be speaking at Waseda University , hosted by Tetsuya Sakai. On November 20, I will be giving a keynote talk at IBIS 2022 (Information-Based Induction Sciences). Thank you very much to Toshihiro Kamishima for inviting me!…
White Rabbit from The Nursery Alice , illustrated by John Tenniel. As long as I have been teaching, I’ve used a “late day” policy in most of my classes. I designed this policy after learning about universal course design while taking Preparing Future Faculty at the University of Minnesota, but I don’t think I’ve ever publicly written down the motivations and design of this policy. So here you go!…
Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash A few years ago, early in my first faculty position, I wrote about how I tracked academic work . I still implement the core ideas of that piece, but most of the details have changed; I thought now, after working on my first annual review after applying for tenure, would be a good time to write an update. Updated Oct. 24, 2022: added a note about how I save the…
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash If we can aggressively simplify for a moment, earning a Ph.D has three primary components: Do research. Write it up in a dissertation. Convince a committee of faculty that what you’ve done and presented is worthy of a research-based terminal academic degree. There are some other things in each program, such as courses and qualifiers, but this is the heart of…
Photo by Takehiro Tomiyama on Unsplash It has been a couple of years, hasn’t it? I thought I would do another state of the tools . Last year I had other things on my mind and didn’t get to this kind of thing, but let’s give it a whirl. Things I’ve Kept My stack has stabilized quite a bit over the last few years; many things are the same, or slightly upgraded, from 2019 . Highlights: Surface…
Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash One of my projects this year has been to refactor and upgrade our Book Data Tools to be easier to work with. Along the way I found some bugs in the original data integration, and the process of finding these bugs and assessing their impact forms a useful case study for some of the principles I teach in my data science class . Current State The current…
This is the ninth article in my series on productivity . Regular routines help me plan my work, use my tools, and sleep better going into a new week. Ritual is a powerful tool for navigating life. David Allen, in Getting Things Done , promotes a weekly review to take stock of your current Next Action lists, identify projects that need to be moved up (or down) the stack, and plan what’s next.…
Photo by Jordi Moncasi on Unsplash This is the eighth article in my series on productivity . I use a “runway” document to plan my work on a multi-semester timeframe. In “ Holes ”, I noted that one of the holes in my work planning and management is a good tool for tracking and planning upcoming work over time. I have now filled that hole with my Runway Document , which also replaces “ The Wall ”.…
I use Jupyter notebooks extensively for data analysis and exploration. It’s fantastic to be able to quickly see output, including plots, and have it all saved and persisted and viewable on GitHub. However, when it comes time to prepare for publication, I need to save high-resolution and/or vector versions of the plots for use in LaTeX or Word. The display in Jupyter does not have nearly high…