Another committee meeting finished
It's been a long time since my last post. I have been quite
busy for the past month, and have just finished my 8th committee meeting. I
can't really say when I can defense yet, but there is a good chance it would be
this summer. Everything that has a beginning has an end, right?
My recent work is about case studies using DynaMIT to
demonstrate how we could use scalable methods to speed up real-time Dynamic
Traffic Assignment (DTA) systems, which are often envisioned to be the key
component for Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS). Such case studies
are not easy because one need to deal with lots of practical issues, which were
simply ignored or barely mentioned in existing literatures. I have run into so
many existing approaches that were only tested on small networks with cleaned
data, and most of them would probably never work on real-time applications for
large-scale problems. (Well, ironically, many of them do put the
"real-time" tag on themselves and get published.)
For my studies, analyzing the complexity of algorithms is
not enough; I also need to understand how the hardware works and find the
bottlenecks in the whole system from profiling studies. Moreover, to really
demonstrate my ideas, I would also need to implement my approach in a decent
way, and test it on large networks. In one of my early committee meetings,
after hearing my presentation, a professor commented: "You are the first (student)
to complain about a network is too small." What can I say? Of course I
know using large networks for case study brings more trouble – more than just
taking longer time to run; but if all we do is for a small network, why would
one need that much “fire power”?