Question: hi ,what do you normally do on a day to day basis? talk ne through your day :)

David Corne answered on 16 Jun 2011:

OK, here’s what I did Friday 15th June

Timings are approximate, and this is a fairly standard day in terms of the apparent randomness of activities, except usually there are more meetings with my PhD students. Also often I get more work actually done, but sometimes less work done.

0930—1000 dealt with lots of emails about many different things
1000—1200 worked on a “data analytics” project – I’m trying to design
an algorithm that looks at what’s happening in a large scale computer
system, and predicts things about it, such as when things might suddenly
slow down or crash. The work I did in these couple of hours was half
writing the software to try out the latest ideas, and half writing a report about the algorithm.
1200–1300 grabbed a tuna sandwich, and then did some paperwork to do with recruiting some new superstar mathematicians and computer scientists to come and work at Heriot-Watt.
1300–1400 read some recent papers about analysing EEG signals (brainwaves), because I’m doing some work with EEG soon using data from people doing a specific interesting task, where the idea is to work out if we can tell if someone is good at the task just by analysing the EEG, and I want to make sure I know the latest findings and methods.
1400–1430 lots of email writing and replying about all kinds of things
1430–1600 Had lots of tea and occasional chats with people in our common room, all the time trying to work through in my mind some ideas to try on the EEG data
1600–1630 I wrote a review of a scientific paper – this was actually a paper about the computational properties of slime mould! The paper had been submitted to a journal (a specialised scientific magazine), and I had been offered the task of judging if it was good enough to be published.
1630–1700 browsed the web in a slightly dazed manner — did some imascientist.