Today I'm re-entering a space that I left some time ago. Many years ago, back in school, we had an assignment to maintain a blog, and post interesting things on it. Unfortunately, the site hosting my blog met the way of a server crash, and that data all disappeared. I've stayed off the blogosphere since then.

I've now reached a point where I think it's important to write more stuff down. I don't feel like I'm a forgetful person, but I find myself getting to the end of most days and not remembering all of the interesting things that I did, or conversations I had, or sights I saw. With life full of many meetings, greetings, thoughts, views, and people, everything kind of ends up in a blur.

So, by way of introduction: I'm a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Sydney, Australia. I work in natural language processing, a subfield of artificial intelligence focused on understanding human languages with computers. Prior to this I completed a Bachelor of Information Technology degree, with Honours majoring in computer science.

In the 2012-2013 year I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, a prestigious award that has given me the opportunity to spend a year at UC Berkeley in California. As I type this, I'm about to clock up three weeks in the United States. I think I'm settled in now; it's time to get stuck into things.

I'm aiming to record some of my experiences as a first-time Statesider, a Fulbright grantee, a computer science grad student in the Bay Area, and an Australian who's a long way from home. I'll muse about things that interest me (and hopefully you, dear reader). Hopefully I'll learn something about myself posting here to. Here goes.