Today I met with Richard Murray, who currently is my academic advisor, and for the first time we talked about research.

He told me this is a good time to see what’s going on in various disciplines and to talk to people here at Caltech whose interests overlap (even for an epsilon) with mine.

Here’s the list, in no particular order:

• Emmanuel Candes (compressed sampling, detection vs. estimation)
• Christof Koch
• Michael Dickinson
• Houman Owhadi
• Ralph Adolphs (MRI)
• Steven Quartz (decision making)
• Mani Chandy (distributed decision making, super idempotent functions)
• Joel Burdick
• Pietro Perona

Plus, we talked about some of topics being currently studied in his group:

• networks (Shi Ling)
• verification (Nok)
• biological computing (Elisa Franco)

Research, at last! I was starting to accept that my main activity here at Caltech would have been doing homework.