I Fight for the Users

Keeping records of academic activity and effort, as you go, makes it easier to prepare review materials and to understand your activity and performance.

Photo by Anton Savinov on Unsplash Goodbye 2025!

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash Ph.D. admissions committees, faculty search committees, etc. need to review dozens to hundreds of applications for a limited number of positions, and need to do so in a way that gives each applicant a fair review and k…

Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash.

In my end-of-year blogging, I usually provide an update on my toolbox, and a review of the year.

Photo by Philip Swinburn on Unsplash.

Photo by Zalfa Imani on Unsplash Inspired by Alan Said & Sole Pera’s posts on LinkedIn, here’s a quick summary of where you can find me and/or my work at RecSys next week in Bar, Italy: On Monday, I will be at the 7th FAccTRec Workshop I am co-organizing…

Photo by Jordan McDonald on Unsplash There are more intervention strategies in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — Hamlet, sort-of Tomorrow, I will be presenting our paper in the IR4Good track at ECIR 2024 on strategic IR i…

I often get comments, and sometimes questions, about my Zoom and video lecture setup in my office.

Photo by Vertex Designs on Unsplash I’ve often closed out the year with two blog posts: my tool report, and a year-in-review.

Photo by Dan Cristian Pădureț on Unsplash It’s time for another review of my current toolkit!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash TLDR: LensKit is going to keep using a custom layer on top of Python’s ProcessPoolExecutor, but moving that out into a separate package.

Photo by Cedric Verstraete on Unsplash There are a number of steps in preparing the final (or “camera-ready”) version of a paper for publication.

Things change.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash A few years ago, I posted annual reviews of what I did in the year; thought that this year I might bring that tradition back.

Photo by Cesar Carlevarino Aragon on Unsplash It’s time for this year’s State of the Tools.

I’m starting to do some speaking again, and now that Japan has opened back up for travel, I’m very pleased to be giving a couple of talks later this month: On November 19, I will be speaking at Waseda University, hosted by Tetsuya Sakai.

White Rabbit from The Nursery Alice, illustrated by John Tenniel.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash A few years ago, early in my first faculty position, I wrote about how I tracked academic work.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash If we can aggressively simplify for a moment, earning a Ph.D has three primary components: Do research.

Photo by Takehiro Tomiyama on Unsplash It has been a couple of years, hasn’t it?

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash One of my projects this year has been to refactor and upgrade our Book Data Tools to be easier to work with.

This is the ninth article in my series on productivity.

Photo by Jordi Moncasi on Unsplash This is the eighth article in my series on productivity.

I use Jupyter notebooks extensively for data analysis and exploration.