Had lunch with Anna

I had lunch with Anna today. Anna is the computational linguist I designed the slope one collaborative filtering algorithm with. What is slope one? No published paper yet, but that’s the algorithm Sean implemented in PHP/SQL for indiscover.net. It is a very neat algorithm and we hope to have a paper out on it soon!

Anna has a Ph.D. in linguistics from McGill… in Montr�al… the city we both love… She recently left a researcher job at NRC, she was my neighbour, for a job in some cool Montréal start-up. This start-up seems soooo cool. They might just change the world… well, a tiny bit of it. Of course, Anna couldn’t tell me more than what’s public knowledge, but it sounded so cool.

Unavoidable subject: Ph.D.s leaving pure research for industry and doing so totally on purpose. Anna chose to go back to industry. That’s a concept most tenured or half-tenured scholars don’t understand… But watch it! Anna is one hell of scholar, wherever she is…

We talked about the fact that academia doesn’t have words to describe scholars who go outside of academia… it is like… like they fall off the world.

Note: Some might object that NRC is not academia. And they’d be right… but somehow, NRC manages to walk a fine line and remain mostly an academic creature while being a giant government lab. So the difference is more of a nuance, really.

After meeting Seb last week in Montréal, now Anna… I’m having so much fun! The next one I want to see in Montréal is Harold: quit chatting with Tim Berners-Lee and come by Montréal. I might not be as smart as Tim, but I know some cool cafés Tim doesn’t know! (Explanation: Harold is attending WWW2004, and I think he is in a workshop together with Tim so he’ll probably talk to him. Harold is famous, you know. You get that way after working 16 hours a day for the last 20 years.)