Subject: thesis

From: Paul Coddington <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 10:06:20 +1030 (CST)

Hi Saleh,

Last time I saw you, which was about 3 months ago, you said that
you had to finish your thesis in about 3 months and that you would
send me chapters to read, but so far I haven't received anything.
How is it going?

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Dr Paul Coddington, Department of Computer Science 
University of Adelaide, S.A. 5005, Australia
Tel: +61 8 8303-4949    Fax: +61 8 8303-4366
Email: [email-masked]
Web: http://www.cs.adelaide.edu.au/users/paulc/

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From: Saleh Elmohamed <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 22:21:47 -0500

Hi Paul,

I'm hacking at it... It is driving me crazy. 
In the mean time, Geoffrey is pushing me pretty hard to produce a paper 
or two on something other than the optimization stuff. He said with 
only the optimization things I'm doing there is very little chance of 
getting any decent job nowadays. I said to him, thanks a million! He suppose
to help me with job hunting.
Anyway, me and other student came up with very interesting synchronization
protocol to be use at the master-slave mode in a java-based collaborative
applications. We're currently testing it... Another distraction from the
thesis.

Back to the thesis, in regard to the comparative study of various
annealing algorithms I'm doing lots of analysis and interpretation of 
various behaviors arising from the simulation using various schedules... 
For example, what effects various parameters have on the run time, 
solution quality. Also the solution quality vs. computational efforts, 
time vs. problem size, and robustness vs. quality, etc. Also number 
moves per generation vs. mean final energy... Greg Sorkin of IBM was
telling me that for the reheating and adaptive schedules to plot the
actual temp used vs. the iterations (or total of moves attempted so far 
at whatever temperature). That is log axis for T and linear axis for
iteration count. He was saying this probably the most important part.
 
All of this with the following set of main parameters taken into account: 
the T reduction factor, time at each T, initial T, and final T. One thing 
to ask is how the energy landscape change as we alter one or more of the 
give parameters.
Anyway, other people I communicate with tell me such analysis is quite
important in understanding how the solution of the problem evolve and how
its landscape got to be formed.

Well, I'm cramming all of this in one chapter and we hope we can produce
a good paper out of it. I have lots of things of general nature which
I'm not quite comfortable with. Also I need to put the mean field 
annealing chapter back on track. It is still in the beginning stages. 
I'm going to need your help so once I feel I have something that
I'd like you to look at I'll mail it. Whatever that may be, a chapter
or something more. As a matter of fact I'm going to mail something soon... 
Time is really running out. I've already missed the Dec'99 graduation 
deadline but I guess that is ok, as long as I have most of the things 
are written up before the holiday. I sure don't want to have another 
miserable Xmas in Syarcuse.

Please, keep emailing me pointers, suggestions, etc. and tell me to KEEP
MOVING! I don't get that much of email from Geoffrey nowdays. You
probably heard that he is moving down to Florida next semester. Will be
the head of new dept at Florida State Univ. I know at least one group (Bryan
and some of his students) will move down with him. ... Who knows,
if I do will in this thesis and those papers I may get hired here. 
Well, don't know whether it is such a  good idea to continue living in
Syracuse though; been here too long.

Keep in touch. I sure will.

best regards,
Saleh

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From: Paul Coddington <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 1999 14:35:20 +1030 (CST)

The analysis of different parameters etc sounds OK - that's the kind
of thing that would be needed to give quantitative analysis of your
results.

Can you send me the latest outline of your thesis, i.e. what the
chapters and sections are going to be (the table of contents)?
I think I discussed the structure with you when I was there but
I'd like to go over it again. 

It's also important that we finish off the two papers on mean-field and
simulated annealing. I think you need to get a couple more publications 
to show that you have a strong thesis.

Writing up is probably the hardest part of the thesis, particularly if
you have to do other stuff at the same time. But you really need to 
stick to it. Best thing is not to keep putting it off and waiting until
you have all the results, but just write up whatever you have now and
then add more results as you get them. Having it all written up makes
it much easier to decide what is missing and how much more needs to be
done to have an adequate thesis. There are tons of things you can do,
but we don't have time to spend looking at all the possibilities - you
need to concentrate on the important things and just finish the thing.