ScratchMyTail.com » School

My Master Thesis

ScratchMyTail — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 18:22:55 +0000

I have now started on my second year as a master student at the Univeristy of Tromsø. The program is built up like this: first year = 6×10 point courses, second, and last year, one large 60 points master thesis. I am currently working on this “enormous and scary” thesis. The thesis is a small puzzle in a larger project at the university. The main focus for this project is information availability, and how we can receive information based on our current context.

My task in this project is to build a system that makes information available, and handles context awareness. I am also building a prototype application which utilizes this system. The prototype is a bus application that runs on the iPhone. The main objective of this application is to receive route information based on the users current location.

The deadline for my master is 15th May 2010. There is of course a last exam where I must defend my thesis during a public presentation and a following closed oral examination. I will put my master out in to my portfolio when its history.

exam’s, Vacation, and papers

ScratchMyTail — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:20:07 +0000

Its been a long time since I wrote something constructive on this blog now (again). I have been very very very busy reading up for the final exams. Today I had an oral exam in the course “Advanced Distributed Systems”, it went okay I guess. Talked about MapReduce, Google File System, Dryad, Oivos, and some other systems and concepts.

I’m going home to Mo i Rana 10th june after the “Advanced Database Systems” exam. I start working the 15th june at the National Library (Nasjonalbiblioteket) in my home town Mo i Rana. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but at least it’s some IT related stuff.

I have decided to “publish” the papers I have written this semester. You can find them in the list below with a short description. Enjoy. They are not that long.

“Face Recognition” – The paper was written as the second mandatory assignment in the “Advanced Database Systems” course. The paper is a survey type of paper. It sums up the different techniques used for detecting and recognizing faces in images. It is a very interesting topic.
“Supporting Mobility in Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Middleware” – This paper was written as the third mandatory assignment in the “Middleware” course. This paper is also a survey kind of paper. It sums up different techniques on how it is possible to support mobility in publish/subscribe system. Interesting read.
“Optimizing Hadoop for the Cluster” – This paper was written as the second mandatory assignment in the “Advanced Distributed Systems” course. In this paper I describe how we can optimize Hadoop for its cluster. The experiments conducted shows that tweaking the default configuration gives two times smaller job-latency. Very interesting paper this as well.

So thats an update for now. Have a nice summer. I will try my best to write more posts during the “vacation”. So stay tuned.

Whats up doc?

ScratchMyTail — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:33:47 +0000

Oh my god is this a post? Yeah, I know, haven’t been able to post that much on my awesome blog lately. To keep it short, school is a bitch. I am currently working on three mandatory assignments, first deadline is 15th April and the last is 22nd April. This is hopefully my last mandatory assignments ever. So what are these assignments about? Well, I am going to write three papers. The first paper is about Face Recognition, quite interesting actually (finished). The second paper is about Publish/Subscribe systems, this one is also quite interesting (almost done). The third and last one is about optimizing and testing different Hadoop configurations, quite interesting but alot of work I think (haven’t started). Maybe I’ll post them on my blog so that you nerdy readers can check them out.

I still don’t have a chosen problem for my master thesis. Hopefully I’ll have it ready before the summer. I’ll see you later innovator!

Back to school after Christmas celebration

ScratchMyTail — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:00:18 +0000

Today was the first day at school after the holidays. This is my second semester, first year, on my Master’s Degree in Computer Science at the University of Tromsø, Norway. This semester I’m attending three classes; Advanced Distributed Systems, Advanced Database Systems and Middleware. I think it’s going to be much harder this semester. People at the university tells me three Computer Science courses each at 10 PTS is quite alot. Wish me good luck, I think I’m gonna need it.

I’m going to post more information about the courses later on.