4-1 days left

Not a lot of practicing. Jim gave me some suggestions on the presentation, and I incorporated those. I feel very ready.

7-5 days left

I'm still too tired to be working much. I've practiced a bit, but I feel like I'm ready.

8 days left.

still sick. still no work.

9 days left

so sick. no work.

10 days left

I made good progress on the talk today, and I pretty much have it in a close-to-final version. I just need to polish it a bit.

11 days left

More work on the talk.

12 days left

More work on the talk. I wish I had this sort of precision worked out for my job talks. I don't like practicing with Dan here because I sound like an idiot talking out loud and repeating myself over and over. Tomorrow should get in some good time just working through the language.

13 days left

worked on presentation

14 days left

I practiced dissertation talk for the group. It was rough - lots of questions that mixed harassment and very useful comments. I asked for that, but it was not a happy presentation. There will be lots of practice this week.

15 days left

Submitted the dissertation to the committee today. I added the section on accuracy, made Jim's changes to chapters 6 and 7, and revised the introduction and conclusion as was needed. I did some cleanup on chapter 4, as well as writing the conclusion to that chapter.

There are still some things I have to do- formatting the references, cleaning up some typos, etc - but the main document is finished. I edited my talk a bit, also, and will present that to the group tomorrow.

16 days left

I got tons of stuff from jim today on all the chapters and revised chapters i'd given him. It's useful, but a lot of work. The paper I made out of the chapter on the trust definition was also rejected from IJCAI today. The comments were half about it not having context (which it does in the dissertation), but some that are worth addressing. I've noted what I have to do there.

After meeting with jim, I incorporated most of his changes on chapter 4 (the previous work), including the addition of PKI background to justify what will go in chapter 6. I also made all the changes he suggested to the introduction (chapter 1) and the future work (chapter 10).

17 days left

I worked on some general clean up today. Jim emailed me to comment on the continuous algorithms section, which didn't really have a comparison of accuracy. I finally figured out how to implement one of the PKI algorithms for trust. I did that, ran it on the networks, and my algorithm significantly outperforms them. I will have to write those results up (should be quick) and that will really strengthen the chapter.

Today I also put together my presentation. I haven't practiced yet, so there may be changes, but the bulk of the content is there.

18 days left

I finished the conclusion today and merged all of the chapters into a single document. I fixed the formatting issues, added in a few bits here and there, and now have a full and complete draft. Tomorrow I'll get the last set of revisions from Jim, and then Wednesday I'll send it off to the committee for their edits.

Plan for tomorrow: the talk.

I've also been officially scheduled. If you click on April 1st on the departmental calendar you'll see my announcement: http://www.cs.umd.edu/calendar/.

19 days left

wrote 3 pages of conclusion chapter.

20 days left

nothing.

21 days left

nothing. recovering.

22 days left

finished re-work of introduction. scheduled practice defense talk for a week from tomorrow.

23 days left

Reworked introduction to include jim's comments. Added a specific contributions section. I'm working on the first section that gives the broad introduction now. That will be finished tomorrow.

24 days left

finished up future work chapter.

25 days left

added section to continuous trust chapter about the fuzziness of trust

touched up a couple other chapters

27 days left

completed jim's changes to trust definition chapter. finished conclusion of that chapter

28 days left

nothing. interview at UGA.

29 days left

nothing. interview at UGA.

30 days left

Ran some experiments to look for some trust features. Didn't find anything.

31 days left

nothing - interviewing at MIT

32 days left

Completed jim's revisions to social networks chapter.