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T10 Protection Information

Submitted by taylor on November 30, 2009 - 11:01pm

I've been working at LSI for several months and have transitioned form the boring, student type work to real firmware development. I'm now officially a member of the Volume I/O team, which is responsible for performing the real-time RAID operations and safely getting the user-data from cache to disk. This is the coolest group, imho, because our code is hit the most and deals with storing and retrieving user-data, which is ultimately the most critical component of enterprise storage solutions.

Netflix Prize: Reducing Error in Sample-Based Correlation Coefficients

Submitted by taylor on August 17, 2009 - 11:07pm

In a previous post we trying to reduce the temporal complexity of computing correlation coefficients by choosing a clever set of "critics" to represent other the views of all users. This concept was ultimately unsuccessful for us, but it did yield some exciting new ideas.

Netflix Prize: Critic Subsets

Submitted by taylor on July 11, 2009 - 1:10am

I've been doing research in a new and growing area known as Collaborative Filtering. The rise of web 2.0 applications has had the side-effect of creating large amounts of data about large amounts of users - something that before the internet just didn't have a means to happen. Using this data as input to a combination of statistics and artificial intelligence techniques yields the ability to extrapolate and form predictions. Predicting user satisfaction of a given product or a service translates into personalized recommendations for some products over others.

Graduation and a job!

Submitted by taylor on June 11, 2009 - 8:50pm

Hooray, my coursework is over! I still need to defend my thesis, but no pressure because I also got a great job offer! The offer is with LSI (lsi.com) in Boulder as a firmware engineer writing embedded C++ that performs various types of RAID on large hard disk arrays. I'm still working out the details of the contract, but I'm really excited about the position. Also, Marissa got a job offer the same day! Now we just need to find a place to live between East Denver and North Boulder...

Bioinformatics

Submitted by taylor on April 20, 2009 - 3:20am

I've recently been looking into bioinformatics and computational biology because I love the idea of manipulating biology or biological information with computer science. I believe the ubiquitous integration of technology into human physiology is an inevitable leap that will be undergone in my lifetime. We have already laid the groundwork for this revolution and can do things like control rats' movements with joysticks, rewire part of the body to bypass damaged nerves, and crossbreed goats with spiders to produce significant amounts of spidersilk.