2011 is almost over and more than 9 months of my PhD have already passed by. During my math diploma I was founded by the german national academic foundation. Besides some really nice benefits that came along with this every 6 months I was forced to write reports about my study progress. Even though theses reports were sometimes quite annoying I realized that they are a good method for oneself to focus and work more efficient. That is why I decided to continue writing these reports. This time just in english and for a wider audience.
So here is the layout for this longer article:

• things that I have done in 2011
• things that I have learned in 2011
• Weaknesses I have discovered
• Goals for 2012
• final thoughts

Things I have done in 2011

• I started my PhD time Koblenz on a scholarship and I felt I almost had to much freedom. Noone to report to. I have to admit in the beginning it was hard to focus with that much freedom.
• I attended the TET workshop where I have learned some techniques and methods about design thinking. What a great subject and topic. I also met some students from WHU which was also nice!
• I was allowed to visit the Webscie summer school at DERI in NUI Galway Ireland. That was really fantastic.
• I attended the future music camp where I learned a lot about the business and why I don’t think I fit there. Especially I ran a session on bandpage SEO.
• Since my university organized it I also attended the European Summer school on Information Retrieval. It was nice since I had my first poster presentation which reminded me to my old days in school when I attended Jugend Forscht.
• I quit my scholarship and moved to a three year contract as a research assistant. That was nice from a money perspective but in particularly I wanted to have teaching responsabilities and the safty to be founded longer than 2 years.
• I had the idea for my first paper graphity and I conducted an evaluation and created the paper in a team of 5 people.
• I was attending the social sensor kick off meeting in Thessaloniki.
• For the second time I touht a class at “Deutsche Schüler Akademie”. This time with students from 5 different countries and only 20% native German speakers.
• I am supervising a Jugend Forscht project of 2 highly gifted and talented high school students which also uses neo4j and works on software to improove typing.
• I learned more about the impact of social networks by createing the in legend facebook streaming app
• I am advising a bachlor thesis on graph data bases and linked open data.
• I became a most valued blogger for dzone
• I had my first blog article or thing on the internet that became kind of viral.
• I read tim berners lee’s book on weaving the web

Things that I have learned

• It took some time but I got to know computer scientists and their culture / way of thinking
• By now I am finnaly less afraid of programming.
• I am also less afraid of using, configuring and fixing linux
• Even though there is way of improvement I have a much more structured aproach to getting things done (especially writing paper)
• I realized the power of blogging. It is amazing how much feedback you receive if you share your thoughts. You also get to know better recources and get to know people! It is really amazing how much reach a blog can create and how much it can grow. I am really excited to see where this will be going! And I encourage anyone to start blogging!
• I have gained more background on internet technology (protocols / technologies / general understanding)
• Reading the law might help more than talking to a lawyer
• There is a lot of diplomancy during teamwork and it is really good if one (not neccessarily onself) is able to apply it.
• Smart and creative ideas are very appreciated in university.
• Amazingly motivating people is still one of my greatest assets.
• I kind of understand how EU founded research projects are applied for and how they are working and where a lot of money in our institute comes from.
• I am becoming more familiar how the system within computer science works
• I made the experience how (at least theoretically easy) it is to create a paper
• Lenovo thinkpads are just amazing + having the suitable business notebook really makes you move it everywhere and work on your stuff. 8 hours of battery are just perfect! (no I am not sponsored by lenovo but honestly it is the first notebook I am literally taking everywhere and it just works fine)
• Diversity is the key to everything. Diversity in teams and between human beeings in general will almost every time lead to the most amazing things
• Unfortunatly I am mentally not as flexible / dynamic fast learning as I used to be when I was younger (thinking in used patterns seems to be very comfortable)
• Mathmaticians really have an amazing ability to understand complex abstract concepts in any context. They are able to generalzie almost everything.
• It is incredibly easy to become an authority or gain social proof while making statements on something. In particular it is interesting how much more credible things are if someone else gives you trust (e.g. being cited or being invited to give a talk)
• I increased my marketing knowledge and experience in how to create a brand
• If you want to be a successfull enterpreneur or company focus on great products and outstanding service! This is how you beat the market. Marketing is not about selling and promoting stuff. it is about having the best product / service and communicate this in a smart way….
• I understood many different levels of the general information retrieval problem. What different levels of search exist. The concept of information need. In particular I understood the many non technical challanges of this problem and the problems of language and semantics.
• I finnaly realized why social networks should not be monetarized via advertising (almost no click through rates on banner ads) I also understood why search is such a cash cow (at least revenue wise) information need (also for advertising) from the user is given which naturally leads to high click through rates.
• I understood how big the facebook bubble is that is being created. I almost hope they will enter the stock market soon. I will definatly bet some money and buy puts.
• Speaking of this I got introduced to the concept of an ego network and what the implications of this are to a social network and to running a social network. It is actually embarresing that I never realized those concepts myself by running metalcon. Furthermore it is just amazing to me how much impact the concept of a persons ego network has to his everyday life and to his mindset.
• I did learn why people using linux after a while only show a sad smile to windows users. It is unbelievable how much pain in the ass windows is

Weaknesses I still have

• Even though I have acomplished many things I still have the feeling that I am procrastinating a lot (guess due to bad time management)
• I still show a tendancy towards overcommitment which means to many paralell projects
• Together with this comes my hard time focussing (especially on scientific output related output)
• For some reason I am still not too keen on reading. I am not reading enough paper / blogs / mags / mailing lists / news …
• My written communication skills could improve a lot. Especially spelling and structure
• With this comes communication in general way to improve.
• I am not doing enough pyhiscal excercises I have gained weight and I am tired a lot
• I am not learning enouh chinese not to say I am forgetting my Chinese.
• I have to make things happen and state the obvious. Especially realize the moments in which I think outside the box and have creative ideas. In my research I was constantly talking about a social circle in order to reference the ego network of a user. Some months later google plus comes up with the circle concept. I was talking about this for ages without realizing that I should seperate this from all the rest in order to create something big!

goals for 2012

• The main goal is to write a solid good PhD proposal. I am still batteling between too topics. 1.) organizing social news feeds from your cirle of friends. 2.) distributing graph data bases. The first problem is more application oriented the second one seems to be more technical. There are many reasons that speak for both topics. I guess I will move twords the second problem. In any case I will have to write the proposal and submit it to a suitable conference. I will also have to write a German version of it in order to aply for the PhD scholarship from the German national academic foundation.
• I want to go back to China. In the best case do a 3 month research trip with jiaotong daxue in shanghai.
• I am still very interested in doing an internship. Since my professor said I could eather do an internship or go abroad I will have to choose. But if I should go for the internship I will have too look into google (research), yahoo research, linked in, facebook, last.fm maybe even simfy or find another interesting company.
• There is most certainly the need to write more papers and I already have some very concrete and specific ideas (including solutions) so if anyone is interested in real joint work contact me any time! The ideas are in the subjects of (information retrieval, differential geometry, logging in graph data bases, sparql queries as graph traversals, sentence prediction using n grams and neo4j
• There has to be progress with metalcon and with in legend
• I want to run a seminar on one or two topics which could be search engines or graph data bases and its applications.
• I want to spend more time on contributing to wikipedia. Especially I want to include this in teaching at university.
• I already started and want to further improve my time management skills. I want to use todo lists more eficiently and also make more use of tools like a calander system. Also my workbalance between free time vs. work time has to be increased
• I want to improve on my chinese language skills
• I want teach my third course with deutsche schüler akademie.
• I want to do even more team work projects
• I want to create a reading class in university in order to do some more efficient research.
• And as some private goals I want to make more music, model, do the toungtwister video, physical exercise on a regular basis

Some final thoughts

I really received a lot of help from my advisor / university. Going back to university was so far the best idea in my live. I totally know why I returned. I am enjoing the time in university from both perspectives the freedom as well as the topic.
So what have you guys been doing in 2011 and what are your goals for 2012? In any case I wish you a happy new year!