The Compressed Sensing Community Part deux.

In a previous entry, I tabulated most of the statistics regarding the traffic coming to this site on the subject of Compressed Sensing / Compressive Sensing. My last guess was that about 88 people were searching the subject per day on Google. I made a similar request to Mark Davenport and Marco Duarte and they came back with the statistics from the Rice Compressed Sensing page they maintain. Here they are in graphics form (one for the camera site and the other for the main resource site)




This is an increase over time that eventually yielded about 7300 visitors (4000 new and 3000 revisiting) this past March. These numbers are consistent with the previous number of 4000 visits on this blog. Since the Rice repository works also as a reference I am not overly surprised at the high number of revisits. This community is growing slowly but steadily....

Let me make a point again, if you are just starting in this field and you are either producing algorithms, proofs, contributing some implementation or making hardware, it is important to both you and the visibility of the whole community that you have a web page, even if it is a page holder (for those of you for whom English is not your mother tongue, a page holder is a web page
that has minimal information about you and your work). The expectation is that over time, you will want to add additional niceties to it and that it will eventually become your resume. Another view about this is given by Seth Goldin in "Why Bother Having a Resume". Go read it I'll wait... The excerpt of interest is this.

...That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?

If you don't have a resume, what do you have?

How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?
Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?....

I personally consider Compressed Sensing to be one of these sophisticated projects and looking at the trend above, people seem to think increasingly so as well. Oh, and no it does not matter if you have worked on Space plumbing or Weapons Plutonium Disposition before, if you are contributing to the field, then people will find out one way or another. I also realize that in academia, a much higher weight is given to a resume but I would not be surprised that more informally, a web page will take some increasing importance over time. This being said, it becomes easy to update your resume when you have taken the time of updating your web page.