Last Thursday morning, I had another viva session and this time I was an internal examiner. I went out early from home, thinking that I should be in campus earlier. But alas, before the Seremban RnR (northbound), there was a traffic jam due to an accident. So in the end, I arrived in campus at the usual time (slightly after 8am). The student who was having her viva was from our own group, Jessica Liang, a MSc student of my younger colleague Dr. Chan. Her work was essentially on the spectra of known network models (undirected and directed). It was an interesting work, well within the usual theme 'Can you hear the shape of a drum?', the drum now being the different network models. The work showed motifs influence the spectra much (something new that I have learned). Jessica defended her work well and below is a picture after her viva.
The field of complex networks was something I wanted the institute to explore on since there are many applications of it but my interest in it stemmed from my earlier interest of topology and hyperbolic geometry. I wasn't very successful in getting much interest and in pursuing the field as it is heavy on data mining and computing, which are not my strong forte. Had a few student projects in it and some went incomplete. One indeed was with Security Commission on collusion detection; I hope they are happy with what we have given them given our limited resources.
Come the weekend, my son who has just began work at a computing firm, went back home to get more of his things here. He seems to be doing alright from what I can see. There was something else that I looked forward to in the weekend, an invitation from an old school friend to attend his daughter's wedding. Many of my school-mates will be there and was hoping to meet them all. On Sunday, we had a good breakfast with the family at Restoran Kambing Terbang in Garden Homes; in the morning, they serve good roti canai etc. After breakfast, three of us (me & my other half and the youngest) headed off to Bahau for the wedding. There, met many of my school friends. Here are some pics:
It was nice to see them again after all those years. However, we could not stay long there (and miss the larger group photo) since my other half has a seminar that she wanted to attend and my son is going back to his place as well. So we were back home around 2-ish (was expecting a traffic jam but it wasn't that bad).
Today, thee is another seminar event at the Physics Department; it was meant to be under my watch. Luckily, the younger colleagues have taken care of everything, since I was out of the communication loop on the matter. So I met Prof. Han Sang-Wook, this time face-to-face. The last time, we organized a joint JBNU-UPM (virtual) seminar and was communicating with him. His talk was on "X-Ray Absorption Fine Structure and Atomic Short-Range Ordering in Materials" (the poster made had a little misspelling on his name, so I do not show it here). It was an interesting talk giving me the picture of how x-ray absorption spectra can be a probe for the local geometry of atoms in the material. Here are some pics.
Was told by the chairperson that Prof. Han will give a plenary talk at the MASS conference in Terengganu, followed by a visit to UMK in Kelantan.
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