More Updates

So my niece Reagan was born on Friday afternoon. 6lbs 13ozs and a bundle of joy to go with it. I guess its been said many times, but babies that are related to you in some way bring out much happiness.

I won't say it made me reflect on my life when I wouldn't have otherwise, because thats a common occurrence for me. But it did make me think about what I want for my own children in the future. Maybe I'll discuss that sometime.

More ketchup:
So I graduate from the University of South Alabama on December 6th with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering. I must say it has been a very long and hard-fought battle; many have died in my wake. I feel so lazy lately, but I seem to be getting the work done and getting the grades I want. I'm unsure if its because I'm used to doing MORE work to get good grades and that I've just gotten really good at learning; or if the classes are just a lot easier. One would think the senior and graduate level courses would be more difficult. I find my world-experience prepares me for the more applied nature of these courses.

I'm attempting to get a Research Assistantship (RA) at Georgia Tech for Spring Semester in their PhD program for Computer Engineering. Yeah, I'm skipping the Masters program altogether. I really want to do original research and don't want to ride in on someone's lab-coattails for work I could have done myself. I plan on doing research involving Machine Intelligence with Aerospace and/or Military applications.

I find a lot of PhD-people in this field really ARE NOT well-versed in a broad sense. I realize PhD-work is supposed to be very specific, but I don't think its worth much in a career situation unless one is at least up-to-date with the rest of the field. Why learn about Machine Intelligence if you don't know much about CPU-design?

The Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence is Transcendence of thought from a machine. Not a day goes by that I don't think about the different aspects of how such a monumental task could be accomplished. There are many different facets to the design of such a thing covering a large field in Computing and Biology. If I had the startup capital, I would go pick up about 20 top students from around the world and bring them together to build it. I'd bring several Mathematicians, distributed computing wizards, Neural Network and Fuzzy Logic masters, and a couple very imaginative geniuses. What I've learned in my education is that CPU/GPU speed is totally off the charts compared to even 5 years ago. The parallel processing capabilities of the human brain haven't been matched yet, but I'd bet something more primitive could have already been surpassed by one of the ATI or Nvidia GPUs.

So what if it wouldn't be as smart as a human. Giving a machine the learning capabilities of even just a cat or a dog would put a big "do you remember when?" bookmark in history. I'm being extremely over-simplistic here, but I don't care to discuss some of the finer details on implementation on a blog.

Back to school tomorrow. At least my AC works again.