The third year of my PhD is arriving at it’s end and now all my forces are focused on the final manuscript writing, alongside with several side projects (done in collaboration with other PhD students). My experience of updating the blog on everyday basis at the start of February 2022 was more distracting from the work than I though, although it helped to keep the writing-oriented state of mind. This time, in order to boost my writing productivity I’ll attempt to return here more often with work related and personal updates.

After some difficult time without much ideas about how to write, and what to write about, I’ve decided to review this blog. Many things have happened since I’ve last time update this page: new Machine Learning courses, participation in the AIMS2 program preparation, first time teaching of the M2 Econometrics course and many more. In this post I’ll attempt to describe some of my new ideas concerning this blog’s past and future. I hope that the next several months will be marked by an uptake in the activity on this blog with some new interesting topics to come.

It’s highly probable, that the days to come will be marked with a lot of activity on this blog. Some of the last discussions pushed me forward to start publishing on several topics I’ve considered as not worth of it. Among the most interesting points comes the discussion of the R related ecosystem. This topic regroups both the discussion about the FOS Software, as well as the R language itself.

Lately, I’ve taken a break from the technical publications about R and informatics in general. This is mostly because I was distracted by a more immediate problems: the choice of a bike for this academic year. My contract with the Metrovelo, the most popular bike-rental company in Grenoble, has expired around 10-th september, pushing me to reconsider my travel choices.

In Grenoble, as in many other european towns, the transportation choices are more versatile than in Moscow, or any northern cities in general. So what are the alternatives?

Personally I have rather mixed feeling towards the wishlists. Even though having a list of gifts is convenient, it somewhat reduces the joy. However, after some recent discussions I’ve realised that probably creating some sort of wishlist may be not such a bad idea. But making this “wishlist” useful for some other people may be an even better idea.

So, what can be interesting for people who adore gadgets and tinkering, preferring at the same time to stick with some Open Source solutions? Well, first of all I’ve looked through some suggestions and gift-lists over the Internet, but was astonished by sometimes ill chosen ideas. Mugs with UNIX memes? Tee-shirts with TUX? FOSS based symbolic and sometimes absolutely useless accessories? Evidently, it’s only my point of view, but such things are rather boring and uninteresting.

My name is Nikita Gusarov and I’m currently doing my Doctoral studies at the University Grenoble Alpes located in France.

My work is primarily focused on exploration of the performances of Discrete Choice Models (DCM) in modelling individual behaviour. This is a rather breathtaking topic, because of its interdisciplinary nature. I have to deal at the same time with different techniques from quite distant fields, among which:

• Statistics
• Econometrics
• Machine Learning
• Combinatorics and Optimisation

As well as various behavioural theories, specific for several domains: