New Year 2011

Happy New Year to all! Hope you have a great 2011!

A quick update

I realize looking at the date of my last blog entry that it has been really long since I have shared my thoughts. As usual, life has been very busy. Although, I have a number of things and experiences in mind that I would like to share, and I am hoping to get to those after finishing up the quarter in a week or so.

Seeing the sun rise, been a while

An amazing thing happened today, somewhat unwittingly. Today was a grant proposal meeting, and in order to get to the meeting on time, I planned on waking up at 5:30 am in the morning. I wanted to wake up early enough so that I can beat the traffic to the meeting venue. The thought of seeing sunrise never crossed my mind -- maybe because I was working on a paged file manager API for my database class in c++ the whole evening before, and when I was ready to sleep, I was only thinking of whether I would wake up early, with enough sleep, to safely drive to my morning destination; or it was merely the fact that I forgot what sunrise meant.

I woke up at 5:30 am, and something felt wrong. I expected to see light outside, but instead saw darkness consume the world. I looked at my laptop, and realized I was almost an hour early before the sun. These simple sequence of affairs hit me -- I am so involved with my graduate school life that I have forgotten to take some time off to enjoy nature. And then I did this: I made black tea, with sugar and milk, sat down on the couch in my balcony, sipped tea and watched the whole phenomenon of sunrise unfold, again after a long time.

New blog for machine learners/data miners

Alex Smola has started writing a blog, Adventures in Data Land. I have looked at a few entries, and I already like what he is doing. He is sharing tips and tricks that machine learners and data miners would love to have in their repertoire. I hope he also shares his ideas on some machine learning problems that, in his opinion, are the most challenging. Thanks Alex.

Frogger

I think this is one of the most hilarious xkcd.

Pastoral idealism

I started reading Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden - Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America.

I like this quote from Freund describing fantasy, and am quoting it from the book:

The creating of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of "reservations" and "nature-parks" in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threaten to change ... the earth rapidly into something unrecognizable. The "reservation" is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else; there everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what is useless and even what is harmful. The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation reclaimed from the encroaches of the reality principle.

CVPR 2010

I am in San Francisco right now for CVPR 2010. I was planning on writing up something on some of the interesting papers that I have seen here, but the conference has been keeping me extremely busy. Maybe I will write something up once I leave for home tomorrow afternoon. To summarize my experiences so far, CVPR started out not that exciting but in the last two to three days I have seen some excellent work. I am looking forward to this afternoon session on sparse coding.

How machine learners go for lunch?

This is how my friend, a machine learner, uncertain about where to go and get lunch from decided to settle the problem:

"...random walk on campus, with a bias towards the food courts."

$\textstyle \pi$ Day

Happy $\textstyle \pi$ Day!!

Another computer vision paper

Here is the paper that we are discussing this week at our computer vision seminar. This is work by Kolmogorov, Vicente and Rother on jointly optimizing segmentation and image appearance models using a MAP-MRF formulation.