On December 1st 2004 I defended my PhD dissertation. It was tough but also fun. This page documents the defense itself as well as the following receptions, partying and general fun I had during those days. Thanks to Anna, Barry and my Mom for help with the pictures.
The audience is getting ready for my one hour talk about the context gap. The three gentlemen in the front are my committee and right above are my supervisor Peter Carstensen and my co-supervisor Paul Dourish. My parents and one of my brothers are sitting on the third row middle. My other brother had an exam that day and couldn't be there.
"As you can see this is a real problem we are dealing with here..." ...and I am not referring to the blank board, the slides were projected only on one side.
"...and this is the way I propose that we deal with it..." I continue talking about my view of context-aware computing.
The committee members are wondering what to ask me during the next questioning session.
During the break people had the opportunity to discuss my talk and meet old friends.
I am taking a big sip of water to prepare myself for questioning.
"So what do you actually mean by saying it is not possible to model context from sensor information?", Jacob asked.
I answered the best I could that it is all about the impossibility to create abstract levels of human context from sensor information. I thought answering questions from my senior and very clever colleagues was harder than I had anticipated.
But in the end I made my committee laugh and there were no grumpy faces.
Thanks Anna for taking a picture of me while I am trying to catch the attendees of my reception!
But the reverse picture shows how we were just hanging out waiting for my committee to come back.
Other people are enjoying themselves at the reception as well, these are all in my department.
Rikke is keeping me busy so I don't get too nervous about my committee returning.
Other old friends from RUC (and a new one from Aarhus) showed up as well.
Rikke and Mikkel, both Magleaas friends among lots of other labels.
Finally after the committee returned and pronounced that I had passed, I was relieved and on my way to dinner with my family, advisors and committee.
The day after, I had the pleasure of showing Paul around Copenhagen. Except it only amounted to the round tower, which has a good view of the whole city...
...but at night we all (Paul, Anna, Rikke, Barry and I) went out for beer and ended up getting sushi around 10.30 at night. There is never a wrong time for sushi.
Saturday Dec. 4th was my big reception party. Nadia and her friend helped my mom (who had cooked all the food and prepared it herself, thank you mom!) with the last things as well as serving.
I am almost certain they had fun in the process.
The food looked wonderful and of course there were lots of leftovers.
I helped a bit too...
Sweets
Barry and my dad
Me and my dad
ITU friends re-united
Two PhD students from my department, Nis and Lasse.
Finally, after the party, we went to celebrate that it was Barry's birthday. We went to get some drinks, but judging on the dark circles around my eyes, I was not up for a very late night. But I was very happy with how everything went, all the way from my defense to the reception.