Saturday, August 19, 2006

Computer Vision TA + discovering music that I like

This upcoming semester I'll be one of the two Teaching Assistants for Martial Hebert's Computer Vision class. (The other TA will be Ankur Datta) Most Robotics PhD students take this graduate course to satisfy their perception requirement. Since the 1st semester of the 1st year is a very popular time to take this course (at least it was a popular time for my incoming class), this opportunity will give me a chance to meet the new Robograds.

On another note, I recently out about Pandora Internet Radio, which I have been listening to over the past few days. On this website, you input a favourite song or artist and a radio station is automatically created to match your interests in music. You can then vote for the songs that you heard. The basic idea is to get introduced to music you've never heard but you should enjoy. Another great source for internet radio is Shoutcast and archive.org (download live shows or just stream them!).

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Latent Dirichlet Allocation + Logistic-Normal + Detecting Objects

As a Robotics PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, I took a Computer Vision course called "Advanced Perception." This Machine Learning-intensive course was taught by Alexei (Alyosha) Efros and my final project was all about detecting objects using a variant of Latent Dirichlet Allocation.


Jonathan Huang and I (Tomasz Malisiewicz) created these documents. So if you are into object recognition or just into bayesian hierarchical models you can check out these docs:

Detecting Objects via Multiple Segmentations and Latent Topic Models

Correlated Topic Model Details

You can also download some MATLAB code that Jon put up on the web:
fitting a Hierarchical Logistic-Normal distribution

You can also download our MATLAB Latent Dirichlet Allocation implementation (variational inference)

Enjoy!

karamazov

Yesterday I started reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Last summer I read The Count of Monte Cristo and I really enjoyed it, thus I decided to start another great classic. I wasn't impressed with the ending of Ishmael and decided that I wanted to read something that passed the test of time.