Month: December 2020

We just received notice that our first article titled Camera-based Water Stage and Discharge Prediction with Machine Learning has been accepted for peer review by the Hydrology and Earth System Science .Journal (HESS). It is an online journal that selects two or more official reviewers, but is also left open for public review and comment for two months. This does not mean the article has been accepted for publication, but it is the first step in the process with the hope that we can get it accepted.

In the meantime, we have defined the research plan for the next article which will partly a replication study and partly the development of tools that make it easier for others to duplicate our work. According to my defined “program of study,” I have to write three of these articles to get to the point where I can take start writing my dissertation. In addition to that, I have to take 5-7 additional courses to combine with my Masters degree courses before I have met the minimum requirements of the plan. It seems like there is a ton left to do, but it also seems like we are off to a good start. We will find out if that is true or not by seeing if this paper gets accepted.

This is an amazing story. I have been pretty self-congratulatory about starting a STEM PhD at age 64 with the hope that I can get it done by the time I am 70. A guy named Lucio Chiquito from Medellin, Colombia, just submitted his dissertation to University of Manchester in England at age 104. I thought, well, he probably got it in Sociology or Spanish or History, but no, he got it for work on a tough mathematical characterization of the flow of water in rivers. Guess what I am studying? The study of the flow of water in rivers. His dissertation is a harder version of what I am doing. Notice his little helper down in the bottom right of the photograph. The thing that I liked the most about the guy was, when they asked him what he was going to do now, he told them he wanted to work on perfection his English and German–continuing to learn. Beautiful stuff.

We heard back from the editor for our first journal article. Rather than send it on to the reviewers, he got back with some recommendations he wanted us to make before he did that. We worked feverishly to get that done, asked for an additional week, got permission for two additional weeks, and the paper was canceled. We think this was due to the fact that we got the permission with plenty of time (we are in Pacific time), but it was after the European editorial office had already closed, so we do not think it will be a problem.

We could have gotten by just removing some verbiage the editor did not like (we are agnostic about that part and do not care so we removed it), modifying the format of the equations (this, we believe, is a matter of fashion–one of our authors is a theoretical mathematician and thought it was silly, but again, we do not care so we changed it), he wanted us to change the x-axis labels of some of the graphs (he was definitely right on this one), and he wanted us to compare our results to a specific kind of upper and lower benchmarks. The last item was the cause for the most major revisions and think the paper is a lot better for having done it. We had to add a graph and a table, some citations, and some further analysis, but we think it helped the paper a lot.

I started my first class. There are thirty students from UNL (5) and different schools in Brazil (25). So far, I am enjoying it a lot and it makes sense. That may change, but so far I am not lost (my worst fear) nor am I fearful that I am not going to learn anything. I think I am going to learn a ton and that it will directly apply to my doctoral research. I will get to learn a new tool.