Friday, December 29, 2006

running in patchogue

When I come home for the holidays I like to go running -- unfortunately it is rather dark around suburbia at night time. As opposed to Shadyside, you probably won't encounter any other joggers. Are Long Islanders just anti-running? Here is a link for my Patchogue jogging path.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

semester complete

This past semester I've learned quite a few things. From experience I've learned that TAN trees (Tree Augmented Naive Bayes) is not really better than the Naive Bayes Classifier. I've also learned that if you have lots of training data, then simple things like the nearest neighbour classifier work really well.

I learned a lot of new material from Carlos Guestrin's Graphical Models class. Unlike other classes in the past, this one really did present me with a plethora of new material. Junction Trees (aka Clique Trees) are really cool for exact inference. It was also really nice to see approximate inference algorithms such as loopy belief propagation and generalized belief propagation in action. Overall I think I'll be able to apply some concepts from Conditional Random Fields and approximate inference into my own research in object recognition.

I also finished my Teaching Assistant requirement. I'm still amazed at the high quality of Martial Hebert's Computer Vision course -- the students that take that class are almost ready to start producing research papers in the field. If there is one thing that sticks out from that course is how a large number of seemingly distinct problems get linearized and formulated as eigenvalue problems.

On another, not I started reading Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Pretty standard cyberpunk/hacker literature -- reminds me of World of Warcraft even though I've never played the game. I like it very much so far -- I should be done in a couple of days.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

CVPR 2007: submitted!

Recently I submitted my first research paper to CVPR 2007. This is my first research paper where I'm first author (I had one from RPI where I was the 2nd author). Unfortunately I can't put a link up since it has to go through anonymous reviews.

On another note, the next conference I'm aiming for is ICCV in Brazil!