Nosebleed: Day 1

Last Monday was the first day of the 4th Symposium on the Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science (SMACS) 2008, of which I was very fortunate to be given a chance to participate in the workshop. This 4-day affair was sponsored by the Computing Society of the Philippines.

How was the first day? One word: NOSEBLEED! There were two speakers: the first was a professor from Ateneo de Manila, who talked about some topics in Discrete Mathematics, particularly Group Theory with its applications in Cryptology, and Coding Theory, which includes hamming metrics and parity generator matrices (as far as I can remember). It was interesting. For me, that was venturing deeper into the subject I teach the most b'coz my discrete math classes don't reach that part. The topic needs a lot of set and graph theory as prerequisites. This makes me wonder if my students are really gonna understand it if I ever decide to teach it to them. Well, students usually expect to be spoon-fed even in college. I guess this is better taught in graduate level.

The second speaker was a foreigner from University of Luxembourg, who talked about Argumentation and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. Ok, THIS was totally more nosebleeding. It was interesting, nonetheless, especially because it is applied in AI programming (my favorite area in CS). It's sort of a deeper study in logic. Since nonmonotonic reasoning is something new to me, I wasn't really able to get the whole thing yet. The first parts made sense coz I can relate to the rules of inference and first-order logic. But the rest was like "how did we come to this?". From then on I could only understand fragments. This is also partly because my brain was already having a stack overflow error. Oh well, maybe on my next encounter of this stuff I'd understand it better (should our paths ever meet again).

By the end of the day I was literally beat! I was so weary that going home was to difficult. But I made home in good shape anyways, I just wasn't able to visit a friend I was supposed to visit coz I was too tired.

I have to say that I learned a lot and that the food was great. I had a good time and I looked forward to another nosebleeding session.