Russell's Blog

So, I submitted an abstract titled, "Classification of environmental sequence data using multiple sources of inference." This project is a collaboration with Andrey Kislyuk, who has just graduated from Georgia Tech, supervised by Joshua Weitz. It's a pretty cool project, but Andrey has just graduated and moved on to Pacific Biosciences, so things haven't moved as quickly as I would have liked.

After the first day of talks, I started to get pretty nervous; I thought I would have some downtime during the field expedition to work on my slides. Downtime when Frank Robb, Albert Colman and Anna Perevalova are around? Ha! If I'd met them before walking off the airplane in Petropavlovsk, I would have known how ridiculous an idea that was.

To make matters worse, the organizers had to shift the schedule forward by a day because weather delayed the excursion to Uzon (which I was not planning to join, since I'd just spent a week there). Thus, I found myself in the position of giving and unfinished talk about an unfinished project. Worse, I was going to stand up and talk about probability theory and Bayesian priors to a roomfull of people who ride submarines into underwater volcanoes and discover whole new branches of Earthly life. Worse still, I had to follow Frank Robb's talk about isolating and sequencing organisms that grow on syngas, which he had to cut short because there was just too much awesome for one talk to hold.

To my surprise, I manged to finish the slides during lunch and the coffee break. Also to my surprise, I got a lot of really great questions, and lots of people seemed weirdly excited about the idea of using more than one mathematical technique for sifting through metagenomic data.

I've recently started working on one such analysis (a different project altogether), and I'm gaining an appreciation for just how difficult it is. Perhaps the interest in my talk has more to do with the fact that people in the field really, really want better tools, and there's a lot of enthusiasm for anything that looks halfway promising.

Also, I have to give a big thumbs up to the Russians (and other folks) who gave their talks in English. I once had to give a brief talk on physics in Japanese, and it was one of the most difficult, stressful experiences of my life. It was only five minutes, and I was aided by the fact that Japanese borrows many technical and scientific terms from English. It's not really fair that English is the de facto international language, but I'm really, really glad it is.