Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: upcoming research

  • Cleaning up the blog a little bit at a time

    Things did not start off very quickly today. Perhaps that is an understatement. Things started off painfully slow today. I’m not entirely sure why that happened. The dogs were a little restless last night. My sleep routine is pretty good, but disruptions do seem to create havoc on my day. One of the interesting features of the Oura ring I acquired the other day is that it tracks my sleep patterns pretty closely. I’m enjoying the ring so far and consider it to be a solid purchase. We will see if that type of recommendation holds up after a year. 

    Even writing that last paragraph took a lot longer than it should have to type out those words. Maybe it is time for my efforts at stream of consciousness related prose to give way and consider something more directly. Over the last few days I have been cleaning up the blog a little bit at a time. It’s requiring a bit more effort than I expected, but so far it seems to be worth doing. One of the big things that I need to do is work to remove the “Upcoming Research” page and combine that content into the “Research Trajectory” page. The pages on a blog are stand-alone static content repositories and are not a part of categories or archives in the same way a regular post would be. They are not date driven items they more or less stand on their own instead of being part of a collection. That being said, I don’t need both an upcoming work page and a trajectory page. It’s really the same thing said in two different ways. 

    I went ahead and moved the page to the trash section of the blog. It’s no longer publicly visible and will be deleted shortly. It contained the following:

    Upcoming Research

    This is just a list of upcoming research paper topics that I have started to sketch out. 

    1. Open source MLOps paper (from talks)
    2. eGov 50 revisited paper
    3. Local government technology budget study
    4. The fall of public space paper (could be a book)
    5. A paper on the quadrants of doing
    6. A brief look at my perspective on interns
    7. Some time of perspective on the audience size of ML and why…
    8. ML model stacking
    9. Something on reverse federation
    10. A hyperbolic look at the conjoined triangles of ML
    11. A literature review of modern polling methodology
    12. A literature study of mail vs. non-mail polling methodology in practice and study
    13. ML mesh
    14. A paper on political debt as a concept vs. technical debt

    It looks like all of those topics have been moved into the research trajectory list. Strangely enough the last 5 year writing plan that was loaded up was from March 3, 2022. I know that the content got reworked during week 104 of The Lindahl Letter and I’m going to load the more recent version. Ok, that update had been completed. It looks like my top 5 research interests need to be updated, but outside of that the page is now better updated. 

  • Oh that writing plan collected some dust

    Yesterday I spent some time thinking about my research trajectory and where my writing efforts should be placed. Intellectually I know that I should use the conference cycle to help motivate my writing efforts and keep them on a tight publishing schedule. Over the last few years that has not really happened in a consistent way. I have written and put together content for a series of talks, but I never finished taking that content and putting it into a journal article format or working it into a conference paper. That is probably one of the first things that should be on my writing plan that is in the process of being reworked. My writing schedule works and I turn out content every week. That is a proven effort at this point. It has worked for well over a year within the machine learning content space. All of that content exists in a well contained Google Doc with weeks 1 to 104 planned out for Saturday delivery. At the start of the year, I did take the first year of that content and put it into a manuscript form and it was edited by a professional to make sure it was ready to be shared in print. That cycle will continue until the end of the 104 planned posts. 

    Please keep in mind that my writing plan is not a theme of the year or anything like that. It should be an organized and thoughtful research trajectory from the start to the finish. The other constraint that I put on it is to very clearly view it as a measure of what I could do with the time that I have in front of me. If I only had 5 years to muster up writing efforts, then what should that time be spent on and the most important things should be closer to the beginning of the journey than the end of it. Time is incredibly unforgiving and before you know it from our perspective things will move along with or without the time being put in at the keyboard to create resplendent prose. Within the moment we know time is about to pass, but we have the ability to only elect action or inaction. 

    My 5 year writing plan as of March 3, 2022:

    • Year 1 – Heavy ML focus for the rest of 2022
      • Finish writing a collected series of ML/AI essays on Substack and combine them into a manuscript, “The Lindahl Letter: On Machine Learning Year Two.” This manuscript should include both years one and two. 
        • Weekly Substack posts
        • Manuscript generation at the end of the year
        • Will need to be edited by a professional before the print edition goes live
      • Rework last years speaking engagement talks into academic papers. This could be one combined paper or potentially 5 different papers depending on how the initial effort shapes up.
        • “What is ML Scale? The Where and the When of ML Usage.”
        • “The ML scale problem: Thinking about where and when to use ML, ROI models, synthetic data, repeatable frameworks, and teams.”
        • “Applied ML ROI – Understanding ML ROI from different approaches at scale.”
        • “Demystifying Applied ML – Building Frameworks & Teams to Operationalize ML at Scale.”
        • “Figuring out applied ML: Building frameworks and teams to operationalize ML at scale. V3”
      • Rerun the MLOps Github research and turn that content into a paper
    • Year 2 – For 2023 I want to pivot into studying sentiment analysis and modern polling methodologies. At this point, I will have written 104 essays on ML/AI and should probably refocus on a specific topic that is material to ML/AI, but adjacent to it as an area of research. It’s possible by 2023 that quantum computing will be a huge topic for research and will end up getting some attention as well.
      • Automated sentiment analysis paper
      • Sentiment analysis and machine learning essays for Substack
      • Modern polling methods essays for Substack
      • The breakdown of modern polling paper
    • Year 3 – 2024 will include a return to writing about local government administration and technology. It will be 20 years since earning my master of public administration degree. By this time my writing should be as crisp and focused as it will ever be and my perspective on technology will be well considered from my previous work on ML/AI. 
      • Technology and local government administration
      • The intersection of public administration and technology
      • How technology influences the practice of governing 
      • How government uses ML/AI technology
    • Year 4 – 2025 will probably be the year where quantum computing has broken down modern encryption frameworks. 
      • Changes and uses in encryption technology
      • Encryption and society
      • Quantum encryption
    • Year 5 – 2026 is going to be a year where my backlog should be highly full. The previous 4 years of this writing plan should have created a ton of leftover writing works.
      • A reflective work on ML/AL
      • Did open source MLOps technology survive?
      • Did the serverless trend pan out in the cloud?
  • Researching about research

    Apparently, I had forgotten about making a new static page on the weblog devoted to upcoming research. It already contained over 10 items on the list of work I’m supposed to be completing. Right now I’m looking at several different things that are lined up about what I’m supposed to be working on and they are all somewhat interesting. 

    1. A research trajectory summary
    2. A writing schedule plan
    3. A list of upcoming research (without any prioritization)

    Right now all 3 of those things have been made into static pages on the weblog. The most straightforward part of my planning trifecta (research trajectory statement, writing schedule, and upcoming research plan) of thinking about what I’m going to do next is really the writing schedule. It really just details my plan each week to sit down and be productive at the keyboard. For better or worse that means tracking in advance what my weekend mornings are dedicated to working on and how that time will be best spent. My writing schedule can be summed up as a simple look at weekends vs. weekdays and what needs attention. 

    The upcoming list of research ideas is really just a pile of problems for future consideration. It represents for better or worse a parking place for ideas in need of more attention. That means at some point on some weekend they are going to get the attention they deserve or maybe they will just be abandoned in favor of something else. I only have so much time and attention to spend on things and some items are going to get more of it than others. 

    What I am going to spend some time on today after reviewing the Substack post that was written yesterday for grammar and clarity will be to revise my research trajectory statement and try to get it posted online. I think that is really where I need to spend my focus for the day. It might very well involve a little bit of time with the whiteboard and a little bit of time writing up my efforts after that exercise is complete.