Surviving the Graduate Program | Doing Research | ML Group Resources | Computing Resources | Technical Tips |
Typically you get started with research by doing a project for a class such as CS388 (Natural Language Processing). Here is a list of project suggestions for that class. After your initial success in this class, you usually continue the research with conference courses for independent studies (pass/fail-based).You are supposed to meet with Ray regularly about once a week to discuss on problems, ideas, results, and etc. Please contact Ray directly to make an appointment if you want to work with him.
Ph.D. Program Overview
PhD proposal
      Proposal Presentation Steps page
PhD dissertation
      Dissertation Submission Site
      UT dissertation list-serve & resources
PhD defense
      Defense Rules page
CRA Jobs
UT ACM Chapter
AI Jobs
CS Faculty Job Search Resources
Citing other papers
Including acknowledgment
Postal address
Drawing & Graphing
Uploading your paper on the ML group's publication page
Adding a banner to your .ps file
AI-Lab tech report
Graduate Student Writing Service - UT Writing Center
Significance Test: Please see Student's t-test
See /u/ml/slides for slide samples
Please be sure to schedule a practice talk with the group before you go to conferences for presentation.
Here is a list of meeting rooms. Click on the room name to find its calendar where you can reserve it.
Advice for Designing Scientific Posters
UTCS Poster Design Instructions
The Doctoral Consortium (DC) provides an opportunity for a group of Ph.D. students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives with a panel of established researchers in AI. The DC is usually held as a workshop before the start of the AAAI or IJCAI conference. It is recommended to participate in the DC when you just had your proposal accepted. See 2008 Call for Applications for more information.
The AAAI has a dedicated student program (see the announcement for 2008) that allows students to submit an abstract of a work that is in progress.
How to Be a Good Graduate Student
How to Do Research in the MIT AI Lab
Writing, Publishing, or Presenting Papers, Dissertations, Theses and Grant Proposals
Effective Scientific Electronic Publishing
UT Graduate School: Professional Development
Learning the Lingo
Algoval: Algorithm Evaluation on the Web
Most of our lab currently (07/18) sits in GDC 3N. For PhD students, seating is assigned a little before the start of each semester. If you weren't assigned a seat or want to change seats, Ray needs to submit a request. For Masters students, a form is sent out sometime at the beginning of each semester where you can request for desks.
You can send your email to lunar@cs
if you want to broadcast an email to the all members of the group. You don't have to
duplicate it to Ray since
an email to the group alias also reaches him. You can always check who's on the
list by saying "showalias lunar" on a cs host.
You should also belong to the user group "lunar" so that you can access
the files maintained by the group. Check if you belong the lunar group
by saying "groups [username]".
Please be sure to be on the "ai-students" alias (/u/ai-lab/mail-lists/ai-students),
which deals with more general topics. If you want to be added to the list,
please send an email to risto@cs.
1)Google's group is here.
To send mails to the group, use the email address ut-ml-group at google groups dot com.
Joohyun is the maintainer for this group, so e-mail him if you have issues.
2) We have a Google Calendar for group events. It includes
group meetings, reading groups headed by our group, particularly
relevant FAI talks, Ray's travel schedule, etc. If you're a member of
the above Google Group, you can view, create, edit, and delete events
in this group. To add this calendar to your Google Calendar:
a) In Google Calendar, look for the "Other Calendars" tab and the box
that says "add a friend's calendar"
b) Insert this in the box: 3tcqb5q0080ielcf3dg18c91ok at group dot calendar dot google dot com
VNC broadcasting, Weka, Servlets, CVS, Swing HTML support.
Also check out the Technical Tips
The /var/local directory on each computer is mapped to its local disk, and usually by default one cannot put data there. However after sending an email to gripe@cs, you will be given the right to write on the local disk of your computer. Beware that this local space is not backed up.
UCI dataset (in ARFF format)
Other ML Group datasets
Matlab is a general tool for doing numerical computations with matrices and vectors. Read the man page ( type "man matlab") on the cs machines to get started. Octave is a freely-available GNU program designed for numerical computations. Most Matlab code also run on Octave.
Condor is a software system that manages simulations on a cluster of work stations. Fore more information on how to submit your jobs using condor, please refer to the departmental instructions on running jobs with Condor.
Mastadon cluster machines are available to everyone with a cs account through the Condor job management system, which also manages jobs on the Scout cluster and the linux desktops.
Add the following lines to your .emacs file:
     (setq
            backup-by-copying nil
            backup-by-copying-when-linked t
            backup-by-copying-when-mismatch t)
The group CVS repository is in /u/ml/groupcode/cvsroot. If you start projects there, please be sure to change the default group to lunar by executing 'chgrp -R lunar dir' on every dir you create.
For more information, visit our Mini CVS tutorial page.
There are two things to keep in your mind when you put something in the /u/ml
directory.
Have all the directories in /u/ml/software be u+rwX and g+rwX, but
o-rwX. This would allow group members to make modifications to the
installations e.g. making minor (documented) changes to Makefiles,
gunzipping files unused for a long time, etc. At the same time, it would
not provide such access to the general public.
It can be achieved for directory "foo" and all its subdirectories by
using the command:
chmod -R ug+rwX,o-rwX foo
Have all the directories be owned by "lunar".
It can be achieved for directory "foo" and all its subdirectories by
using the command:
chgrp -R lunar foo
To fix all files in a directory to a group we can use 'chgrp -R lunar *', we can also set the setgid bit for /u/ml and its subdirectories. Then every new file and subdirectories created inside will belong to lunar by default. To set the setgid bit, use 'find -type d | xargs chmod g+s'.
There is a way to check CS emails from web using UT's webmail
facility. This is probably useful from Internet cafes which don't
let you telnet etc..
      1. Go to https://webmail.utexas.edu/
      2. Give your UT EID and password
      3. In the new page, under "Custom Login" give your CS login and password,
write "imap.cs.utexas.edu" for server and "Inbox" for Folder.
For the following URL exception error,
goya.cs.utexas.edu 101> java weka.gui.explorer.Explorer
Warning: No configuration property found in
weka/gui/GenericObjectEditor.props
for weka.experiment.InstanceQuery
Warning: Can't find public property editor for property "options"
      (class "[Ljava.lang.String;").
Skipping.
Setting numeric precision to: 10
Setting axis colour to: green
Setting background colour to: black
Setting attribute bar colour to: black
Displaying attribute bars
Uncaught error fetching image:
java.lang.NullPointerException
           at sun.awt.image.URLImageSource.getConnection(URLImageSource.java:99)
           at sun.awt.image.URLImageSource.getDecoder(URLImageSource.java:108)
           at sun.awt.image.InputStreamImageSource.doFetch(InputStreamImageSource.java:251)
           at sun.awt.image.ImageFetcher.fetchloop(ImageFetcher.java:168)
           at sun.awt.image.ImageFetcher.run(ImageFetcher.java:136)
goya.cs.utexas.edu 102> exit
you might want to change the CLASSPATH. Be sure to incude the current
directory, denoted by a period (.) in your classpath, as in: -classpath .:classes.
The workaround is to run Java with this command-line option:
      -Djava.util.prefs.syncInterval=2000000
      (e.g. java -Xmx500m -Djava.util.prefs.syncInterval=2000000
weka.gui.experiment.Experimenter)
Here is the
bug description (registering needed). Sun labeled it fixed in 1.4.1, but this is clearly wrong. Hopefully they
will fix it in the next release.
Please use "dvips -Ppdf" when you convert your .dvi file to .ps file.
Instructions from AAAI
Suppose your document is named paper.tex. Run the following commands:
dvips -Ppdf -G0 -tletter paper
ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=0 \
      -dSubsetFonts=false -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sPAPERSIZE=letter paper.ps
Old Instructions
The following commands should be used:
dvips -f -Ppdf -G0 < file.dvi > file.ps
ps2pdf13 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer file.ps
To check the fonts of your pdf file, you can do one of the following:
           1. Open the pdf file with acroread and choose File, Document Properties, Fonts tab.
               Embedded fonts will be listed as "Embedded." Fonts that are not embedded will not be marked in any way.
           2. Use the command
               pdffonts file.pdf
Suppose you have two pdf files a.pdf and b.pdf and you would like to combine them into combined.pdf. The following command does the trick:
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combined.pdf -dEmbedAllFonts=true \
-dSubsetFonts=false -dBATCH a.pdf b.pdf
In addition, it forces all fonts to be embedded.
Since you may find creating figures easier using powerpoint or you want to use existing slides in your document, follow these steps.
           1. Save the powerpoint slides into a pdf (print -> save as PDF)
           2. Open the pdf using gimp
           3. Select to import the page you want
           4. Use Tools->Selection Tools to perform any cropping (NOTE: Use Image->Crop to Selection instead of Layer->Crop to Selection)
           5. Save the cropped figure as an eps file
To use a figure in an existing pdf file, simply follow the same steps starting with opening the file using gimp.