I actually just came back from home, yes, home sweet home… Indonesia! 🙂 After I came back from Iceland trip, I only had 19 days to finish every work-related things that need to be closed, before my flight to Jakarta. Did I finish them? Of course… not. Most of the time I was relaxing at home, but there are times when I had to open my laptop, checking and sending emails, and worked until late at night. Those READ MORE
The Cat and The Bear in Iceland
Halló! Cat is back! I’ve been trying to write about this trip since a month ago :D. It wasn’t summer yet back then in Iceland, but the lands were getting greener, although it was still snowing for a day or two. The weather was really unpredictable, like.. stormy rain in the morning, then sunny sunshine in the afternoon. Anyway, it was a very cool trip! Figuratively and literally. Yep, that was our driving route. Our rental car told READ MORE
The Cat and The Bear: Puffin!
I really can’t wait for our next trip… to Iceland! This Saturday the bear will start his summer school in Iceland, and I will be giving a presentation at a conference in Sweden. But after that… it’s time for a road trip! We’ll spend 8 days driving around the Iceland ring road, with the total length of 1,332 km. The itinerary has been set, hotels are booked. Activities include.. natural steam baths *a lot of them! READ MORE
Fresh from My Oven
my birthday presents from the bear: colorful markers & mini pizza oven 😉 the oven has finally made it to my flat! pic.twitter.com/gLofRIwGzt — Paramita Mirza (@paramitamirza) January 22, 2014 Have I told you that I got a cute mini oven as my birthday present? *thanks, dear bear ;)* As proofs that the oven doesn’t just sit there unused, here you go, some of the results… Baked Chicken Wings One day, in a Pakistani shop READ MORE
Empty Inbox Policy
Just recently, my office decided to change the mail server from Microsoft to Google. I’m using Gmail since the beginning of time, forwarding my office mails into my private Gmail account, so that I only have to open one mail client for everything. So, even though Google lets you sign-in to more than one account, and it’s so easy to switch between accounts, at first I thought, “Oh, what a hassle, now I have to READ MORE
Updates on PhD Life
In order to be consistent with ‘one blogpost per month’ this year *damn, I was more productive back then…*, I will just write some updates on my PhD life, which is going quite well. I’m halfway through my second year now, and I can say.. I’m back on track, after being a bit lost during the first year :). #1 Qualifying exam… passed! PhD Research Proposal – Qualifying Exam from Paramita Mirza I passed the READ MORE
Myself: redefined
People change over time, so once in a while I feel the need to redefine myself, Â asking myself “Who am I?”, to be able to go forward. I love cats. Not only because they’re cute, but also because they give me some comfort human cannot give. Only applies if the cat is friendly with me. I hate waiting. Sometimes the impatient is manageable, sometimes it’s not. I love water, and sun. A beach, by the READ MORE
Ski Vacation II (without snow)
As in the previous year, February is the time for ski vacation or… as the Bear said, Winterurlaub! The destination is exactly the same, Hornà Blatná in Czech Republic, and we stayed in the same green house called Pension Florian. The house remained the same, except that… now there’s WiFi! 😀 I still can’t decide whether that is good or not. Last year I felt so happy and relaxed during the vacation because I wasn’t bothered by emails or READ MORE
Top NLP/CL Conferences and Journals
I got this tips from the Research Methodology course that I took last year, which is mandatory for first year students in my PhD program: one of the first steps in the PhD study is knowing your community, i.e. the conferences and journals for your field, where people with the same interests gather and share the knowledge and their research. For Natural Language Processing or Computational Linguistics field, Google Scholar computes the ranking of publications (including READ MORE
Playing with duoLingo
Da die Katze viel freie Zeit hat, lernt sie Deutsch, so dass sie mit der Familie des Bären sprechen kann. Sie lernt mit einem Spiel, welches duoLingo heißt. Es ist interessant! Die Katze lernt so schnell. I knew of duoLingo for the first time on one of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) seminars, as one of prominent online courses for language. At that time I was thinking, “Hmmm… interesting”, but that’s all, I didn’t even bother to try READ MORE