This is a great idea for a thread! We should have these at regular intervals.

I'm working on turning my PhD work into a product. The idea is to take logic-based specifications, expressed as structured english, and produce working information systems (such as web apps) from them. I have a prototype which got me the PhD but I need more work to get to a viable product. An intermediate step I am focusing on at the moment is using this technology to write validation checks for existing large datasets to pick out errors/outliers. So someone would apply the rule "Each patient with diabetes type I must be prescribed insulin" on a relevant dataset and the system would pick out cases where this does not hold. Normally this would need a complex SQL query that must be written by a developer and cannot be verified by the domain expert.

The other thing I'm working on is nurturing my addiction to the 17x17 challenge. This is my first forray into 'serious' math and I'm finding it extremely addictive. I usually dive into this when my motivation is low, and lo and behold, I'm motivated again! Having spent 7 of the last 14 months on this, still no solution, but I do think that if the filters I have work right, I will have trimmed the problem space I'm focusing on to about 52 cpu-days. Now I'm working on implementing these filters and speeding up my primary algorithms to reduce that further.

Finally, my perpetually on hold project is a social news community that provides a personalised experience, is spam-free and requires no moderation. Some of the ideas were expressed in my optimization by proxy articles. The conceptual framework is complete, but coding and productising is too much of an energy draw at the moment, so I'm leaving it aside or pushing it forward at a very slow pace.

If anyone wants to know more about any of the above, just ask.