I woke up this morning with a tickle in my throat. “Ah Ha!” I immediately exclaimed! I know just what to do. My cure for the common cold is a three pronged attack:
The elixir in this post goes along with #1. This sounds weird at first, but it actually tastes really good and is amazing for you.
I took a Myers-Briggs test today during my business class today. My score? E(29), N(25), T(23), P/J(20)
I —————|—- E N ——-|———— S T ——–|———– F P ———-|———- J
This means that I’m Extroverted, INtuitive, Thinking, and a perfect split between Perceiving and Judging. They usually group these in terms of certain complementary groups. I’m in the NT group. Therefore, my personality is split between ENTP, “The Visionary,” and ENTJ, “The Executive.” I’m pretty psyched about that! Here’s an online version of the test (although not the same one I took) if you’re interested to find out what you are.
In fact, after a quick internet search, its hard to find a good version of this test online… maybe I’ll put one up!
This afternoon found me ankle deep in New York City. I stopped by a friend’s office in Harlem to have some lunch, and since then I’ve been hanging out (reading, writing, and programming) at Colombia University in the quad across from the library.
First off, whenever I step out of an airport and start walking around a city I marvel at how quickly life moves. When I ate an apple for breakfast this morning I was nearly 900 miles away from where I sat down to eat lunch. The world is certainly very small.
Something that always strikes me about New York in particular, though, is how it is a wonder just to wander. Some other big cities (Paris comes to mind) have a similar quality. It dawned on me, though why its so fascinating just to look at things. New York is an organic thing. Just as you can look in awe at the bark on a tree (or at least I can), I can see nature’s beauty in the big apple. This is not a city that was planned in the way that a suburban neighborhood is. This city grew up on its own, adapted to its little island, to the throngs of people living here. It says something powerful about the human animal that we can build and thrive in hives like this!
The super short answer: It’s what I study at Georgia Tech.
The longer answer: below…
As part of a program I’m involved in I needed to describe my research succinctly and from a very high level to forty of my colleagues. Many of the people who I was addressing did not have a technical background. I drafted the following short essay to describe what Computer Vision is, and what I do with it as of right now:
Sight, in my opinion, is the most incredible of our five senses. I conduct research in a field known as “Computer Vision.” This area focuses on the higher-level parts of a fascinating overall problem: Teach computers to see like people.
Teaching computers to see can be considered in three layers. The first is image acquisition. Here, I use the term image to mean data that a computer can interpret. This includes pictures like those from a camera, three-dimensional brain scans, and much more. These images are fantastic tools for people, and people alone. Computers cannot understand them without something more.
The next phase is image processing. This step makes the acquired images ‘nicer.’ This includes signal processing problems like removing noise, enhancing colors, and making important features more apparent. A processed image, though, still holds no meaning for the computer… only the humans that look at them.
The third layer is where my research is focused. The computer vision layer takes these processed images and assigns meaning to them. Three key activities here are segmentation, registration, and tracking. Segmentation involves finding the boundary of an object or objects of interest in a scene; registration is the process of lining up two images; and tracking is the process of determining the position of an object over time in a video sequence.
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Last night I finished Hackers and Painters. This book is a collection of essays by Paul Graham, a PhD computer scientist, entrepreneur, and accomplished painter. (All of the essays are also available on his website) He makes a lot of great points about economics, entrepreneurship, design, and society. He also rants ad nauseum about his belief that LISP is the best programming language ever.
One of my big take-aways from this book are that to be successful in a tech startup you must work very hard, and make a product that is beautifully designed and loved by users. Furthermore, you must continue working hard and improving constantly or you’ll get squashed by big competitors. If you can do this, then Graham claims success is inevitable.
I want to share the lessons I learned recently when writing a paper. These were some revelations that helped me get over the procrastination hump and really set me on the writing fast-track.
Read on for an explanation of each of these steps:
Before you do anything else, write a short, to the point thesis topic. It should be one or two sentences and the entire paper should be written to prove that thesis. I stuck mine to the wall above my desk to help keep me focused. They tell you to do this in grade school, and when you’re all grown up, the same rule applies. This will forever-on be the first thing I do when I sit down to write a paper.
All of your experiments should be designed to support your thesis, and completed before you do anything else (so that you know your thesis is right). If your thesis turns out not to be right, then you have to go back to the beginning and pick a new thesis!
When I say experiments, here I mean the work that you’re writing about. In my case ‘experiments’ are figures showing the results of my computer vision algorithms. For someone else it may be analysis of a client’s financial data or a computer simulations of particle movement through a turbulent fluid field.
In any case, doing these with the thesis in mind, and before writing ensures that the experiments are relevant, and help to prove the thesis.
In recursive outlining I start with an outline of sections: Introduction, Background, Novel Algorithm, Results, Conclusion. This takes no time because its the same for almost every paper. Next, go though and add sub-sections, then sub-sub sections.
At this point, most typical ‘outlining’ stops. However, keep going. Add sentence ideas to each sub-sub section, and start making rough guesses about where graphics will go. Add key words to those sentences ideas. All the time, keep the thesis in mind.
Now your paper has all of the ideas you want to present in a very rough form. Inevitably some sections will be sketchier than others, but now the process of refining the text can become very compartmentalized without sacrificing overall idea of the paper.
What the process until now has done is to take apart the paper into these little tasks. The final steps are to turn your sketch for each sub-sub section into an concise, eloquent-sounding, finished piece of writing. Once you have done this for all the sections, give it a final read-over and its done.
Keep in mind that some of these steps may take days, but by following this process you always know what your next action is, and you don’t have to waste a lot of time doing pointless things or re-doing things that were directed towards the wrong point.
It’s true that I have precious little paper-writing experience, but these revelations have helped my writing considerably. I plan to post updates to this as my experience grows and my method evolves. If you have any good tips along these lines, please share them in the comments!
First off, quicksilver is an amazing tool. In fact, this program alone is worth switching to mac for. This post had the video below from the creator (as well as some great get-to-know quicksilver links). The creator has some seriously good ideas about how software and interfacing should work…. and guess what? He works for Google now!
Really, check out this post too.
Corn bread and banana-nut bread are two of life’s little wonders. They are extremely delicious, and mostly healthy. These two have always been favorites of mine, and since I’ve switched up my eating habits I cook them quite often. In the last week, I made both of these delicacies, and wanted to share my recipes. I base these loosely off of the ones found on theppk.com.
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