[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
GrendelFish's LiveJournal:
422 TAing.Image Understanding II.Sensorimotor Computation.- Machine Learning.
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 3:21 pm | Holy crap. So, I'm running intro programming labs again this term. Which is tiring, but a lot more fun and interesting than beta-testing assignments again. Today was the first lab with real work in it, and I quickly fell back into my extremely open and encouraging TA persona. Extroverted, willing to expound on random topics, running back and forth with somewhat exaggerated physical movements. I just realized where this all came from. I'm acting like the Doctor. That completely blows my mind. |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 1:39 pm | my new life Today I set up at my new desk in the Collaborative Robotics Lab, making me officially part of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. This is good for two reason: 1) It is the culmination of a goal I first set on back in high school. Matthew Dockrey, AI Researcher! 2) I now have access to some comfy and fairly private couches for crashing on if I'm stuck on campus. |
| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | |
| 12:34 am | Also, pardon the video linkage, but this Discovery Channel promo makes me happily weepy. If people can make money promoting a worldview like that, maybe we aren't completely screwed. |
| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | |
| 11:34 pm | Tonight I flew down to Olympia with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} neuro42 to have dinner with corivax and caladri.It was a lot of fun! Despite having so many pilot friends I've never managed to go flying with them before. It was a pretty nice day, and the Sound really is gorgeous from the air. I'm happy to report that my map-reading skills haven't atrophied since last summer. (And wow, doing it from a plane is so easy it's almost like cheating. Everything looks just like it does on the map! Much easier than comparing the angles between headlands from a canoe, creeping along at 5 kph.) I got some stick time, which was great, but humbling. That is a skill that will take me a while to learn, when I finally get around to getting my license. So, in conclusion, whee flying! ( Edited to add pictures ) |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 1:56 pm | For the record: doing (Canadian) taxes while deathly ill is not fun. But at least my immune system waited until this week to collapse beneath me. |
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |
| 10:57 pm | CNN WTF This is the current top story on CNN:  They had a halfway normal pic of Wright up earlier. I guess it didn't convey 'scary black preacher' well enough. Have they stopped even pretending to be impartial? They might as well photoshop in a glowing force-ghost of Malcom X at this point. |
| Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | |
| 11:36 pm | *whiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr* With 23 minutes to spare, I am done. A week ago I was dreading this writeup, because I had nothing. Even this morning I was thinking I only had the bare minimum of a real project. As I wrote it, I came to realize it was actually quite interesting. (Though that might just be the Stockholm Syndrome talking.) I still have no idea what kind of marks I'll get, but I'm happy with what I did. I might even have to continue working on this for fun. I've ended up rather proud of all three of my projects. Machine learning because it went from absolute crap to a simply gorgeous and endearingly quirky paper with real results in just 5 days. Image because the system really truly works and will probably get used in the competition this summer. Even sensorimotor, which I really had been thinking of as nothing more than hardware lols -- I'm really glad I forced myself to go back into the lab yesterday and do another 16 data collection runs, and profile the slow pan irregularities. The paper really benefited from it. I can sleep again! I can read fiction! I can... start worrying about finding a thesis. :) |
| 3:42 pm | Dingdingding Rongorongo The Tale of Genji Moby Dick "...what are three things you don't often seen referenced in a Machine Learning paper?" "Correct for 200mg of caffeine!" |
| 12:36 pm | This paper is rated NP HARD by the Mathematical Prudes Association of America. |
| 5:25 am | |
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |
| 3:51 am | AcknowledgmentsThe author acknowledges that this paper sucks. |
| Sunday, April 20th, 2008 | |
| 5:13 pm | phase change I feel like I've leveled up in science over the last couple of days. Something finally clicked in my brain, and suddenly my initial reaction to wondering how to approach a problem is 'lit search!'. Which is really duh, I realize, but I've never been the most rigorous person. It's one of the reasons I wanted to do grad school, to break some of my hacky, adhocratic habits. In a way, it almost feels like cheating. I'm doing less work, getting better results, and I have all these extra papers to cite in the writeup. No wonder this is so popular! |
| Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | |
| 2:12 pm | I just found myself using Lynx, listening to Depeche Mode. It's 1994 again! In other news, I'm not dead. Yet. Updates to come as events unfold. |
| Friday, April 11th, 2008 | |
| 3:59 pm | 1up I have gained a new special ability: immunity from hepatitis B. Thank you, socialized health care! |
| Monday, April 7th, 2008 | |
| 11:59 am | Curling ( Last friday the CS department went curling ) It was fun! It has a nice, sedate pace, with lots of strategizing, and it's actually a pretty good (cardio) workout. Brad is talking about putting together a CS team for next year. I might be able to be talked into that. |
| Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 | |
| 3:12 pm | Bizarre fact for the day If you've ever heard of the Student's t-distribution, this is just crazy. The derivation of the t-distribution was first published in 1908 by William Sealy Gosset, while he worked at a Guinness Brewery in Dublin. He was prohibited from publishing under his own name, so the paper was written under the pseudonym Student. --Wikipedia Weird enough, but then I realized -- under a slightly different corporate climate, this means we could have ended up with a Guiness distribution. Reality is messed up. |
| Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 | |
| 8:20 pm | presentations In case anyone is interested, here is my Image Understanding II project presentation. It won't make for the best reading, though, since I hate presentations where they just read everything off the slides. I also need to post my latest UDLS presentation (on pre-GPS navigation techniques), but I need to annotate them a bit first for public consumption. As an experiment they are all horrible crayon drawings on construction paper. It went over quite well, but without the narration it's basically meaningless. |
| Sunday, March 30th, 2008 | |
| 2:37 am | Science! I spent the day working on my sensorimotor project, which is coming along surprisingly well. ( pics and such ) |
| Friday, March 28th, 2008 | |
| 11:24 am | a vignette It's Friday morning, so I slept in some. Got up, checked LJ and my standard news sources, took a shower. About halfway through, I notice something drifting past the little frosted window. What could that be? I open it a crack -- snow! Several centimeters of snow! Wtf, climate? |
| Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 | |
| 7:52 pm | An update What am I up to, you may be asking1? Well, classes are almost over. I have 2 more assignments to do, one huge and one pretty small. But mostly, now that I have a supervisor, I'm focusing on the 3 class projects due at the end of April. No finals this term, which is nice, but that means projects instead. Image Understanding II: I'm implementing this paper, adding image features from several others, in order to create a generalized image quality assessment for the SRVC project. Basically, we want to screen out cartoons, paintings, illustrations and renderings, while at the same time ranking the remaining images by how good they are for training a classifier. Status: Pretty good. I have the paper implemented, and I'm starting to add the new features. I have a decent training set downloaded, but it could use some more work. Sensorimotor Computation: I'm implementing some visual tracking/servoing on the eye simulation hardware. Not entirely sure what, yet. Basically GYRE in one dimension, with a motor instead of compressed air thrusters. And no freefall. Status: The person who really knew how to run the system left in December, so it took me about 3 weeks to even get it running again. But this weekend I started working on the new code, which so far hasn't been that hard. I need to implement some kind of PID control loop now. Machine Learning: For reasons that are too arrogant to be written down, I want to find a way to match the states in two or more Markov processes as equivalent, given just the initial probabilities and the transition table. As far as I and the professor know, no one has ever done this before. And since I'm dealing with (in the test data set) 94 states, I'm basically searching a 94! permutation space. And this is by far my weakest area. So, good times. Status: lol 1: It's okay if you're not actually asking this. |