My #SAD cocktail party spec

March 25, 2023

⊕This is my writeup companion to the first, inaugural episode of the GLaD Podcast. If you like it and want more like it, you should go listen to the episode (and tell a friend to tell a friend!)

You’re invited to a dinner party, a SAD dinner party. When you ask the hostess (Rachel) what you can bring, she suggests:

• 4 people. These are the only invitees at dinner, so prepare well.

This has been the hardest one to answer, so many people and so many reasons! In some ways it’s a good thing I have this problem of crowding (but it sure makes it tricky!). In the end, I’ve decided to have a real SAD dinner and hand-picked the four people I think have had the biggest impact on the SAD academic I am today. There were more, definitely other people I’d love to have dinner with, but I know dinner with these would be heartwarming as I’d be among people who appreciate me for who I am and have made me a better scholar:

• David Cuartielles: this is my geek claim of fame, one of the co-founders of the Arduino project (look it up, it’s very cool!). I happened to run into David before fame as he was my Scouts leader when I was ten years old. The way he combined technology in creative ways, and his ever-travelling spirit (let alone his taste for long beards!) has stayed with me and influenced many big decisions I’ve made over the years.
• Fernando Sanz Gracia: my PhD supervisor, someone who taught me how to let your students pursue their interests and, like good technology, “do your job and get out of the way”. I’ve always been good friends with him (still am!) but, as good wines, it’s been a relationship that’s got better and better over time because I’ve slowly caught up to realise how good a supervisor he was as I have become one myself.
• Serge J. Rey: Serge is the personification of many of the things I like about the US academic culture. Mission driven, passionate, and placing the right amount of weight on having fun. He made my first visit to the US not be the last and was the start of a long-time friendship.
• Luc Anselin: Luc’s ability to make the complex simple, and to see why space is relevant in so many contexts was eye opening for me, and it still informs many of the ways I approach research today. His ways of framing problems and motivating why space is relevant in today’s world have made me a better teacher, a better researcher, and a better communicator.

These are people I know I’d have a great dinner with. Some of them have never met each other but, like in a good wedding, you know they’d gel because they all have you in common. Hence my choice. There are honorable mentions that didn’t make it to the list because I don’t know them and, if it’s going to be only one dinner, I want to make sure. Yet, I’d like to give them a chance some time, if I have the option of a second dinner!

• Hildegard von Bingen: apparently credited with being one of the first classical music composers in history, all the more remarkable given she was a female making music in the XIth Century. I’ve always wondered what personality would make that happen!
• Malka Older: she was one of the first contemporary sci-fi writers I read and her ability to write fun stories full of big ideas has captivated me since then. Her profile as an academic writing sci-fi is also something that gives me hope maybe my career will take a turn one day that’ll make me more popular in cocktail parties!
• Will Marshall: co-founder of Planet, the mini-satellites company that’s changing remote sensing. Every interview I’ve heard/read with him is full of insight and pretty empty of bullshit, a rare commodity in CEOs these days.
• Matt Mullenweg: similar to Marshall, this is someone who’s main invention (Wordpress) runs the majority of the internet (!) and who’s building an empire on top of open source principles. That, coupled with his soft and sharp touch when interviewed, have made me really want to have dinner with him sometime!

• 1 book, in case conversation is boring and you need to entertain yourself

“Never lost again”, the story of Google Earth and Google Maps, was a really fun (pandemic) read I’d probably turn to if I was getting bored. Although thinking about it, this is a bit cheating because I never re-read books…

For the after-dinner drinks and discussion, you’re also asked to bring:

• 1 formative memory or experience

The first year of my PhD, I mostly just read papers and books. As part of the “training”, every week I’d meet my supervisor and discuss the most important bits I’d read. Pretty early on, Fernando started bringing me classical music: every meeting, I’d bring back the CD (note the time stamp on the statement!) he’d given me the week before, we’d discuss it for the first 10 minutes, and he’d give me a new one for the week ahead. I received his latest recommendation this week (this time in the form of a Spotify URL!) and we continue to exchange views. Sometimes, I even send him back some of my own obscure classical findings.

I picked this as a formative memory because, in addition to opening up the door of classical music, these exchanges taught me the importance of personal relations in Academia. Doing a PhD has an aspect that is not fully unlike a medieval apprenticeship: much is learned through “osmosis” as it were, by interacting with your peers and by absorbing from your mentors. Finding something that helps you bond over beyond the core topic of research is not only fun but also very important.

• 1 accident, fortuitous or otherwise

When I was a PhD student, I wanted to spend a year abroad visiting California (and perhaps picking up a bit of surfing). To dress it up as an academic endeavour, I found one Serge Rey at San Diego State University who was doing very interesting work at the intersection of open source and spatial analysis. It was a bullet proof plan. When my supervisor and I contacted him, he replied very positively and said he’d be happy to host me, but that he was moving to Tempe (AZ) to join the team of one Luc Anselin, and I’d be welcome there. It took me one query to the then new’ish Google Maps to realise my plan had just burst into pieces. No surf, but my career had been born with that email.

• 1 nugget of wisdom

There is a lot to learn from situations where you are outside of your comfort zone. As we progress in our academic (any?) careers, it is possible to narrow the scope of the area you work on, the people you interact with, and the situations you set yourself in. Staying a bit uncomfortable, trying out things we don’t master, or accepting challenges that (we think) go beyond our abilities is the best way I’ve found to stay young.

• 1 regret, professional or otherwise, for when the group has had a bit to drink and conversation turns inwards

This is one that took me a long time to find an answer for. In real or perceived ways, I think I’ve done fairly well “in the end”, so I find it hard to name something I really wish I had done differently. However, as I looked back, I realized there’d been several instances over the years where I did have regrets. For a long time, I wished I’d got my PhD abroad instead of at my home university. At times, I still wish I had taken more math and stats in college, which I didn’t on the belief that if I really needed them in the future (spoiler: you always do), there’d surely be time to pick them up along the way (second spoiler: the window for being able to find time and mindspace to absorb abstract ideas narrows faster than you think, particularly as you progress). But I’ve come around most of these by realising that, yes, I didn’t do those things, but I didn’t in part because I was doing other things that would help define me and shape the scholar I am today. I would have probably not met a supervisor with the dedication and time for me as Fernando, or I probably wouldn’t have had time to read as much urban literature as I did… There’s no free lunch kids.

• In Desert Island Discs, the castaways are given the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare as a given. I’d be curious what two books you think should be a given at any proper SAD dinner party.

I picked two that, ironically, are not very #SAD at first sight:

• Gelman & Hill classic on multilevel models was the book that finally made so much of traditional statistics click in my mind and one I continue to recommend to all my students, even though it actually contains very little space/geography.
• Chollet’s “Deep Learning with Python” is the best introduction I’ve read to get the intuition behind many of the methods that have radically changed “analytics and data” in the last ten years. Another one I try to get all my students to read. This one actually contains quite a bit of space, but in a covert way as most computer vision (e.g., convolutional neural networks) is actually all about space.
• I’d also be curious what you’d want to eat for main course and dessert at this SAD dinner party.

Future generations will likely (and rightly!) loath my choice, but every once in a while (very rarely, I’m mostly vegetarian on regular meals) I enjoy steak tartare. I am also one of those people who start reading the menu from the end, pick a dessert, and work their way back to ensure whatever the rest is “allows” for the calory intake at the end. My favorite sweet is red velvet cake, whose original recipe includes beetroot. One of five a day.