What’s next?

For me , it is important to make sure that the research in AIS and swarm robotics to continue. Therefore me and I PhD office mate a.k.a K*** La* will start thinking about what we should do next ..@#$##%#%#%. We were both supervised by J** T****s and have lots of thing in common. In terms of research, we did more a less the same research and we discussed a lot!! He helped me during my tough time and so did I.  He completed his last month and I completed mine this month ( he started later than me anyway!!). But the main thing is after the hurdles, we managed to survive.

 

 

 

Many congratulations to myself

I am indeed very happy. Alhamdulillah. Last year was the end of my PhD in Y**K U*******Y.

My viva took place on the 27th of Septermber 2011, a few days before I flew back to Malaysia. It took around three hours in general and it was a nighmare. Both examiners asked lots of questions and asked me to do lots of explanations. After the battle, they seemed pleased with the thesis but I need to do corrections with some of the structure of the thesis.

Even though I had completed my viva, it did not mean that I have obtained my PhD. 2 months were given for the corrections but since I am already back in my country, the correction lists came late until early December. Then at that point I was heavily pregnant and about to deliver my precious baby. I managed to complete half of the corrections and completed most of it after my confinement period and yesterday, I received an email that totally end my PhD work.

R**a,

I’ve checked the finished thesis, and it looks really good: well done.

I’ve given the form stating that it has passed to J***th in the department, to forward to the University.

All the best,

F***a

To those who are still struggling , your time will definitely end sooner or later. Have faith and work hard to achieve it. InsyaAllah.

 

On research and teaching ..

• I am currently co-supervising three students who are doing prediction using Artificial Immune Systems. They are doing prediction on rainfall, streamline and waste. The supervision task for Msc and PhD is quite interesting as the three of them are not my students but they are from other university. Thanks to Prof Siti for introducing me to her colleague in Uniten allowing me to obtain supervision experience. There again, another 2 PhD students will start on end of the year and will start co-supervising them on monthly basis..

• I also helped a friend of mine doing an Islamic-oriented research in my university. Even though it does not deals a lot with my area, but I found it beneficial in terms of learning about research and grants …etc…

• At the same time jon, alan and I will be running my code in symbrion simulator starting next month..This is basically the extension of my PhD work which will again involves lots of experiments and results analysis. We will be preparing the journal to be submitted again this year..hopefully.

• Since I have not been teaching since I came back to Malaysia, I will be teaching for short semester which will begin next month, thus preparing for the slides and teaching material is again another task.

• But the best thing of all this teaching and research work, I am happy to be a mother to my 4 months Wafida. Sleepless night is no more a nightmare and i enjoy every single day looking at her face and behaviour.

A long hiatus….

My last entry was posted on the 13th of May 2011 and I stopped writing in here for more than a year now.:) Lots of things had occurred within a year and basically I have:

• ended my PhD journey – September 2011
• done my viva with minor corrections – September 2011
• started work – October 2011
• delivered a baby girl – January 2012
• completed my thesis correction 🙂

Why now? as I thought it is a total waste to just abandon the blog…therefore, I will continue on writing as much as possible in here …

A quick one for Latex Spelling and Grammar Check…

While correcting my thesis, I have been using texniccentre in my office PC running with windows operating systems…its quite easy to check the spelling error using it. However, when running my ubuntu I found it rather difficult to check my spelling error…(Fiona kept on highlighting my spelling error) ..there is no green or red  line indicating error in KILE but you can do the following:

Spell check using aspell

1. Close the editor for the file, otherwise the file cannot be updated.
2. Type aspell --mode=tex -c filename in the terminal — so in this example type aspell --mode=tex -c check.tex.
3. The programme will show the typos one by one. Suggestions for corrections are given as well.
4. At the end your original Latex file will be updated.

latex: natbib issue

I was writing a paper and found out that if I use multiple citations together they appear rather awkwardly in separate square brackets (e.g. [1], [2], [3]). What I wanted is to have them within one bracket and even better to be as a sequence. Solution to this is to use the NATBIB package and then use the citation labels separated by comma within one \cite command. For example:

\usepackage[square, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}

\cite{bluecoat,ciscowan,riverbed}

Should produce the output [1-3] if they are citations 1,2, and 3 or [2,5,7] if they are 2,5 and 7. However, with newer natbib style files there is a weired problem, which shows the error “natbib Error: Bibliography not compatible with author-year citations”. A simple solution to this problem is to use “numbers” option with the package.

\usepackage[numbers,square, comma, sort&compress]{natbib}

:The thesis:

Whilst studying on running the code with epuck robots, this month, I would like to complete the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Introduction -> Completed

Chapter 3: Biological and Artificial Immune Systems

Chapter 4: A Model and Simulation of Granuloma Formation -> First draft of ICARIS paper hopefully

Chapter 6: Result and Analysis From Simulation -> Completed (Submitted to Alan and Jon for further discussion)

RUNNING OMEGA ALGORITHM WITH EPUCK !!!

 

Excerpt from chapter 1 of the thesis…

In this introductory chapter, we present both a motivation and overview of the work detailed in this thesis. First, section 1.1 provides the thesis motivation and inspiration by describing the background work. This is followed by section 1.2 with an examination of the structure and content of the thesis, stating our goal, research questions and contribution of the research.

1.1      Motivation
Despite the enormous bio-inspired algorithms that have been developed, there is few that addresses on how bio-inspired algorithm should be developed and where it should be applied to. The motivation behind the work presented in this thesis is to investigate the issues within the context of immuno-engineering that develops a biologically-inspired algorithm to be applied to issues in fault tolerance in swarm robotic systems.