My advisors just told me my grade for my final thesis I handed in two weeks ago: a 1.0 (which is the best possible grade here).

Well, they've been quite clear about this being the likely result before, since the thesis worked out very well, with a publication on a good conference and such. So right now I'm looking forward to continuing this research and doing a PhD degree. Right now, this would be my favorite option, if I manage to get a position at the university.

Yay! I just handed in my Diploma thesis in Computer Science (approx. Masters degree). It will still be some weeks until it has been graded, the dean has signed the diploma etc., but I'm pretty much done.

The topic of my thesis is

Statistical Approaches for Robustifying Correlation Clustering Algorithms

Some ideas of the thesis are also just being published at the 20th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM) July 9-11, 2008, Hong Kong, China and the associated proceedings (Springer LNCS volume 5069):

Hans-Peter Kriegel, Peer Kröger, Erich Schubert and Arthur Zimek. A General Framework for Increasing the Robustness of PCA-based Correlation Clustering Algorithms

Other related publications will follow (an outlier detection method using parts of my thesis will be submitted to a journal soon, too). And in case the first name on that list rings a bell: he did some major contributions to multi-dimensional data structures such as the R*-Tree, X-Tree and Buddy Tree, and has since been very active in data mining.

I'll be giving a short talk at the graduate seminar next week, and I'll probably publish the slides on my web page. But they will only be a short excerpt of my work due to time limitations of the talk.

So basically, I'm jobless now! :-)

I still have plenty of related ideas to continue research, and my advisor asked me if I'd like to continue with a PhD degree (so you can assume the grade of the thesis won't be too bad). However, the university is always short on open positions, and I don't know if I'll be able to get one (a research proposal is pending). Therefore, I'm looking for a position that allows be to pursue data mining and/or clustering research. Part time jobs are fine if they are well enough paid, although it of course would be best if the job would just include related research. If the job is located outside of Munich, a contact to a local university with a strong data mining research group is needed. (In Munich I obviously already have contacts to a strong research group.)

As you might figure from me posting on Planet Debian, Planet GNOME and similar, I'm fairly experienced in OpenSource and Linux (something like 19 years of programming experience, 13 years of Linux experience). So I'm not just a fresh graduate, but a doer when it comes to coding. (Which is partially why I'd prefer a job outside of the university!)

Anyone with interesting job offers (Google Munich anyone? I've been trying to get a back channel contact with you for weeks), please just drop me an email at erich AT debian DOT org.

P.S. No, that doesn't mean I'm only looking for jobs in the data mining field. It would just be more convenient.