It’s that time of term when exhaustion is settling in. I can almost see the end of the tunnel though… a little scary really that in 2,5 weeks time, I will be having my last lecture here in Cambridge and the bulk of my fourth year project will have to be complete. Still lots to do before then though, two courseworks, a guest presentation I’ve organised, focus groups, meetings, more talks…

Anyway… a selection of highlights from my term so far…

Varsity 100

It’s a controversial list, but I was very pleased to see that I had been nominated for and included in the Varsity 100 list (Varsity being one of the two major Cambridge Student newspapers) which according to the article is “an attempt to list one hundred of the most talented, influential and hard-working students at Cambridge.”.

The full list can be found here (I’m on page 5)…

As they say, the line-up “is never objective but it does at least go some way towards recognising a few of the people who make the most of their time at Cambridge, and perhaps even change it for the better.” Those who know me, know that I would never be so conceited as to not clearly recognise that there are many many talented people here that are not on the list, yet deserve to be there. And that first sentence really is a little over the top…!

Nevertheless … I was very happy to be included : ) And a special thank you to the secret friend/peers/lecturers/others who nominated me for such a mention.

Snow! 2/2/2009

Beautiful Cambridge was of course graced with snow just like most of the country. What a fabulous time I had walking around town snapping up lots of pictures, which you can find here. Shame it didn’t stay longer

Advancing by Degrees – 2/2/2009

While at the University Library taking pictures of the snow from the top floor, I took the chance to go and visit the 800th Anniversary exhibition which was being held there called ‘Advancing by Degrees’, which has lots of historical university-related exhibits. I think my favourites was the book with Darwin’s attendance at botany practicals and JJ Thompson’s logbook on the discovery of the electron…

Rock Guitar in 11 Dimensions – 4/2/2009

As a break from intense project work, I decided to go to a presentation by Dr Mark Lewney with the university Physics Society (which I finally became a life member of… It’s not as sad as it sounds…) on ‘Rock Guitar in 11 Dimensions’.

Marketed as a chance to relate rock music, vibrations and Superstring theory I was naturally (…) rather excited, but the lecture turned out not to be very interesting, I thought. It was more of a popular science talk which would have been a perfect motivational presentation for secondary school students. 

Perhaps me arriving 1 hour early for the talk by mistake was ‘a sign’ from above that I might not enjoy it……

Why Study Insulators – 11/2/2009

Another Physics society talk, this time with Professor Jim Scott lecturing, who is the father of ferroelectric systems such as ferroelectric memory FRAM (i.e. what many of us have in our computers). Few people came (surprisingly) for such a good speaker, although admittedly I did struggle to stay awake in the last ten minutes of the talk… what else can happen after three lectures and a meeting with my project supervisor… Anyway, to my great surprise, my new Solid State Device lecturer on the Friday after started covering a new topic… ‘Ferro-electric memory’! What a coincidence!

Prince Philip Visits the Engineering Department 12/2/2009

What an honour it was to have been selected as one of a couple of students who would have the privilege of sharing lunch with Prince Philip, Chancellor of the university and Professor Richards, Vice-chancellor, during Prince Philip’s visit to Cambridge on 12th February. This was such a special event that I will relate it in a separate blog post, when I get the photos on Monday. In the mean-time, you can find the official department account here.

Image Processing Talk 18/2/2009

Yesterday was such a busy day. The past few days had been filled with late night work until 4:30am on my project, and when Wednesday came I was shattered. The day started off on the wrong foot when I opened my eyes in the morning only to realise that I had 10 minutes to get dressed etc… and run to the department… which normally takes me 15 minutes… The lectures were interesting though: Image Processing (Harr Transforms) followed by more ferro-electric memories in my Solid State Devices class with a nice, silently humorous, Chinese lecturer who made me smile when he started the lecture early in order to make sure people arrived a little early for our next lecture with him in order to cover more material. He’s a very good lecturer though so luckily the hour passes quite quickly : )

These lectures were followed by a quick break during which I organised posters for a presentation I have organised for next week (I’ve arranged for Infusion Technologies (and Microsoft) to give a talk on multi-touch technologies and bring in a Microsoft Surface for us to play with ! Should be exceptionally fun).

This was followed by a fascinating seminar by Dr Anil Kokaram, an alumnus of the department (and a collaborator of his from ‘The Foundry’, a special effects company based in London). Dr Kokaram talked about how he won a technical Oscar for his visual effects software, used in films such as Xmen and the Da Vinci Code (one of my favourite films). A fascinating insight into the post-production industry. This motivational talk was followed by a more technical one which went into more details of the engineering behind the methods (which unfortunately included Bayes…)

Twilight at the Museum 18/2/2009

Sandwiched between the Image Processing Talk and the excitement of exploring Cambridge’s museums by night with a torch, I found an hour to meet my project supervisor in our always-constructive weekly meetings.

‘Twilight at the Museums’ is an initiative run every year for families to come in to many of the Cambridge museums when darkness has set in, and roam around the exhibits with nothing but a torch. I’ve been meaning to go for the past four years, but never found the time until yesterday…Now, I think ‘families’ was perhaps a correct word to describe the people who were with me visiting the microscopic Scott Polar Museum, with bits and pieces of polar exhibitions. In fact it was more like hoards of 8 year olds roaming around trying to find the answers to the ‘polar quest’ to win some sort of prize… Suffice it to say I was somewhat disappointed by that museum, so decide to trail on to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge’s largest museum. That was somewhat better, with almost real darkness in the museum rooms, but it was still very busy, and since I’ve been there before it wasn’t particularly interesting (and no… I didn’t break any vases…). I had time for one more museum, so opted for the ‘Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’. I don’t know why really… But as it turned out, it was fabulous. Not many people were there and I was free to explore the plentiful museum exhibits in pitch black with my (well… Hugo’s) torch. I learnt a lot about loads of things from early civilizations to the history and development of Cambridge. Absolutely fascinating. I did wonder though how a society whose pride was once ancient pottery and stone weapons managed to invent something as awful as probability theory and Bayes’s Theorem 9 millenia later (you may have noticed that I’m not a great fan of probability… I never liked estatistics (not a typo- my good friends from school will understand!)…

Lectures & work

Suffice it to say lots of both around. I’m really enjoying my lectures this term, including the predictive control one which I thought might have been a bit dull/hard. I’m ‘enjoying’ going to an additional module ‘Information Theory, Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks’ with Professor David Mackay for fun (not for credit…). It’s not an easy module but Professsor Mackay ‘wrote the book’ (literally!) on information theory and so he has a very unique perspective on the subject, and his lecturing is engaging (although I usually come out ‘confused’, with a lot to digest from the lectures)… It’s particularly challenging when he sets problems during the lecture and gives you 40 seconds to get an answer……

Machine Learning is as expected horrendously hard but again I’m not doing that module for credit so a little relief there… Nothing much to say about the other modules… I also depressingly got my exam timetable yesterday… but it’s not too bad they are quite spread out except for VLSI design and Non-linear Control on the same day

Two courseworks coming up for me… One in Advanced Telecommunications Networks which involves analysing the advantages of VoIP, and another in VLSI Design which involves some Scanning Electron Microscopy, which should be quite fun! And on the topic of coursework… Got my Technological Innovation coursework back from last term; I’d promised to put up a copy on my blog when it was marked, but as it turns out we’re now looking into getting my analysis work on the optical disc industry published in a scientific Journal, so I’ll wait before publishing it here!

Project is going well. Busy as usual, but in a nutshell, at the moment I’m looking at dividing videos into lots of patches, learning a dictionary of patches that characterise all the images, applying gradient descriptors onto the patches, and experimenting with various comparison techniques to perform accurate object recognition from video. I’m quite pleased with the results so far, though of course I’m trying to do better… but not much time left! An example of what I am doing is shown below!

for videos of 100 objects such as this one:

Family

I was very jealous of my family this week who travelled to Portugal for half-term to oversee and make decisions about building work in our lovely new island house there, while I was stuck here in cold Cambridge. Anyway, I hear the building work is going very well, so I look forward to going there in April for the holidays!

Mum and Dad (sea view from the house behind) ~  My Sisters under an orange tree…

That’s all for this week!

W@

Lots of text here at the top… pictures below

Course Modules

I’m doing fun modules this term! Well, I think they’re fun anyway… These are the ones I’m ‘officially’ doing:

• VLSI Design, technology and CAD
• Advanced Telecommunications Networks
• Solid State Devices and Chemical/Biological Sensors
• Non-Linear and Predictive Control

And for more fun, I thought I’m hoping to continue going to these as well… unless I drown under a flood of work…

• Machine Learning (eek! Hard…)
• Image Processing

By now, I’ve had at least two lectures of all of these, and am enjoying most of them, without falling asleep too much. I also seem to have more lectures in common with my friends this term, so I’m happy too

Machine learning is probably (no pun intended…) the hardest and seems to be a tornado of equations and probability, but I suppose it is (very …) relevant to my project…

In Solid State Devices we’re looking at more metal-insulator-semiconductor engineering (lectured by my Italian director of studies- his lectures are very amusing…).

Non-Linear and Predictive Control consists of a plethora of seemingly-complicated theorems, which when unravelled turn out to be rather trivial… so far…

VLSI Design is given by a lecturer which I really like… he’s not the type of lecturer who jumps up and down enthusiastically at the front of the lecture room, but he’s always methodical and has some of the best handouts in the department… So far we’ve looked at MOSFET theory (again…) and started looking at basic design techniques for large scale semiconductor-projects, e.g. for computer processors.

Advanced Telecommunications is very narrative (but I expected that), and we’ve been looking at layer 2 components of the OSI model. The coursework this year is about VoIP so I’m spending some time looking up advantages/disadvantages… If anyone has any thoughts/experiences, do tell me…

Project

For those that are interested in where I’m up to in my project (Object Recognition from Video), you can download a copy of my short Technical Milestone Report which describes what I did last term and where I’m going now…

Currently, I’m looking at splitting video sequences into lots of image patches, and trying to learn which patches best help us to discriminate between different objects, initially using machine-learning algorithms such as k-means clustering, and trying out different techniques based on the results I obtained last term. I was confused for quite a while the other days when my object recognition system kept insisting that the object in the video containing a walnut was the same as in a video containing a big cuddly teddy bear… until I found a bug in my code : )

Click here for a copy of my Technical Milestone Report!

WPF Webcast

I watched a great webcast the other day, organised by Microsoft UK for the Student Partners. It was presented by Kris Athi (with whom I was in Seattle in September) who gave us a deep-dive into the wonders of WPF. I have to say it inspired me to have a go… but after hours of pulling my hair with datagrids and data-binding in Expression Blend and an infuriating bug in Blend, I admitted defeat… for now… I’ll be back with a vengeance at some point : )

Geocaching Night Cache

One of my friends, Hugo, and I set off last week to attempt another GeoCache (see my earlier post on the topic), this time called ‘Cambridge Ghosts’… This was a night cache so we set off around midnight into the cold streets of Cambridge following Hugo’s ever-reliable’ GPS (ahem…). By 1:45am we had collected all the clues and had made our way to the supposed hiding place of the cache… only to spend 45 minutes rummaging around in a pitch-black undergrowth with my camera and Hugo’s phone as our only source of illumination…

Unfortunately, we didn’t find it! So came back the next day in daylight … only to be forced to abandon that attempt too due to inconsiderate fishermen who were fishing along the Cam, just where the cache was hidden… but that was not the end… Determined to find it, we came back after midnight and spent 2 hours looking again… until Hugo finally found it! A victorious moment indeed… some photos below! I came back with a lovely little rubber duck taken from the cache as a souvenir…

(a ghost…)

We got home at 2:45am… These geocaches are really great fun!

BETT 2009

Of course, after getting come at a ridiculous time after the geocaching night, I then had to prepare my bag for the fun of the next day… Went to bed at 4 am got up at 6am to head off to BETT 2009 (the world’s largest educational technology event).

Of course, because of my tendency to be over-punctual, I arrived in London far too early and so ventured off to say hello to Tower Bridge at 7am… It was also an interesting day, given that half the tubes were not running…grrr!

The trade show was really nice, and got to see lots and lots of new educational technologies, smart boards, multi-touch surfaces, lots of software, hardware kits, Virtual Learning environments, etc… Microsoft also had a very nice stall, where among other things they were showing off their multi-touch Surface Table. It was also lovely to meet up with a teacher and friend from my old school!

After the show, a quick shopping was in order, with Harrods, Hamleys and Oxford Street being completed in a short 3 hours… Suffice it to say my feet hurt for two days after…!

Cambridge University 800th Anniversary.

I manage to get back from London just in time for the opening ceremony of the university’s 800th anniversary celebrations, which was held in central Cambridge, where thousands of people gathered to hear all the bells in Cambridge ringing and to watch the light show… It was nice, but I thought it lacked a nice dramatic soundtrack…

It was so packed that we were very far away so my video wasn’t great, but here is someone else’s which is quite nice : )

It was certainly a busy week! Now … lots of project work planned for the week-end!

W@

“To innovate or not to innovate”

The first two weeks were ‘delightfully’ filled by my module coursework for Technological Innovation, which took somewhat longer than I had envisaged (and stretched the word limit somewhat…)! The topic I had chosen was ‘An analysis of the key developments and innovations in the optical-disc storage industry, covering topics such as driving forces for innovation, analyses of industry ecosystems and the development of dominant designs. Additionally, it was very relevant to the work I have been doing at the patent office over the past three years.

As soon as the marking process is completed, I’ll put up a copy on here, as I’m sure you are all dying to read it….

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services

Had a lot of fun playing with Windows Sharepoint services over the holidays, something I’d been meaning to do for a long time. For those who don’t know, Sharepoint is like an online collaboration tool, whose interface is simply a website in a browser.

Managed to set it up in Vista (thanks to this excellent guide) and Win Server 2008 (running in a VM), and after a couple of hours was sharing my SharePoint site across the home network… but not externally… I still haven’t figured out the password to the wireless router…

The customisation for the SharePoint site is easy to do with Office SharePoint Designer (although, that being said, there were once or twice when I seriously messed up the page layout by deleting what I shouldn’t have…!)

Anyway, the screenshot shows what I was playing with, with mum, for a school Virtual Learning Environment…

Christmas and Portugal

All of you know how much I enjoy Christmas time… and this year was extra special, knowing that it was my last Christmas holiday as ‘a student’… well probably…Had a wonderful time with the family in NL, became a grand master at Wii Golf (although the living room ceiling lamp only just survived my masterful swings), did-not-quite-perfect my radio helicopter flying skills… and spent a couple of days in Portugal looking at a nice island beach house : ) There we also met up with Hugo’s lovely family… What a lovely place Portugal. It was nice and warm and it was shopping paradise!!! For an avid shopper like myself, shopping at quarter to midnight in a huge shopping mall is heavenly! We also travelled to the most south-westerly point of Europe… another one to add to the travel records!

I should add that the 2 top beach pictures are my sister’s before she accuses me of ‘stealing her artistic inspiration’ : )

Windows 7

After a firework-full New-Year’s eve in Holland, I spent the last week of the holidays ‘thinking’ about my project while… installing Windows 7….. So far I’m loving it, except for a few minor issues like with my weird 22” external monitor which refuses to remember its resolution after reboots… Windows 7 just feels so much faster and snappy, and I’m loving the little things that just keep surprising me (e.g. font browser. shortcuts…)! I didn’t think I would be a big fan of Document/Music/Video Libraries in W7, but I have to say, I have no idea how I managed without them before… The new Windows Media Player is very sleek and the taskbar is very very nice indeed. I’m looking forward to the final release…

It was also lovely to see people ice-skating in Holland (well sort of… it was also cold…). I don’t think I had seen ice-skating in at least a decade.

Once again, a fabulous holiday…

Let me start by going way back and complete the term in Cambridge!

IT Exhibition

The 12th November saw the Annual Cambridge University IT Exhibition, in which I was fortunate to be allowed to exhibit on behalf of Microsoft. On my stall, ‘Microsoft for Students and Staff’, I exhibited about many Microsoft academic promotions such as Dreamspark, the Imagine Cup and the Ultimate Steal. It was a lovely day and I talked and met with many interesting people.

CUED Prize-Ceremony

A highlight of the year which I unfortunately missed as it was on the same day as the IT exhibition… Thank you very much to i2 for sponsoring the prize I was awarded for my Third-year ‘Computer-Based project’ on ‘The Design of a new evaporator control system for a petro-chemical plant’.

Christmas Lights in Cambridge

As many of you know, I’m very fond of Christmas, and so it will come as no surprise that I made sure I was there for the official ‘switch-on’ of the Christmas lights in Cambridge, an ‘event’ which I had missed the past three years… Cambridge Market Square was packed, and after a somewhat rushed countdown, a couple of hundred bulbs illuminated the facade of Cambridge City Council… a lot of hype for a few lights, but it was nice all the same!

Project Presentation

One of the undoubted milestones of this term was the highly-anticipated 4th-year project presentation… It was a chance to summarize our work this term to an audience of PhD students, post-docs and intimidating doctors from the Machine Intelligence Laboratory . The questions were more challenging than I had expected, but overall it was a very useful experience. For those interested in what I have been working on this term, click on the image below for a copy of my presentation:

Captcha Presentation

As a way to relax after the project presentation, I headed off to a fascinating talk held by the Computing Department’s security group, on the methods of cracking captchas, which ranged from the ridiculously easy (but apparently effective!) method used of counting pixels to discriminate between letters and numbers to more complex methods of segmenting up letters in captchas for decryption. I found it very amusing how the techniques they described were very basic and yet so effective at cracking even the most complex ones used today by companies such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft- and I found especially amusing the times when the speaker had a good laugh at the expense of engineers who try to apply complex image pattern processing to this problem… I strategically neglected to reveal which department I was affiliated with and did not reveal that I had just completed a 16 lecture course on pattern processing in order to avoid becoming the laughing stock of the assembly It’s as I always believed: there are ways of solving problems without probability!

Final weeks

The final weeks in Cambridge were not the most enjoyable. I was exceedingly ill for the last two weeks of term with a bad case of my favourite illness: the common cold (probably brought on after waiting 30 minutes for a bus after the Captcha presentation in freezing rain)… Despite this, I pulled myself out of bed to go and watch the project presentations of my friends in the Signal Processing Lab, but didn’t regret it given the very interesting topics many presented on, ranging from intelligent image editing to cheating and gambling methods! The Staff-Student Joint Committee Election also took place and I was re-elected to 4th year Representative (OK… I’ll admit… without opposition… funny how no-one wants to apply for this committee- it’s actually quite goof fun trying to debate decade-old issues hoping that one day they may be resolved!).

In my illness I, of course, had a plethora of courseworks to complete: one for my Control System Design (4F1) course and the other for my Nanotech (4B5) class. The control system design was much harder than I had expected- it was a matter of designing a two-degree of freedom lag-lead compensator to stabilize and unstable plant… Going off on an incorrect tangent at the start combined with a murdering headache didn’t help, but I eventually got there… The nanotech coursework was very interesting in that it also explored many quantum mechanics concepts learnt in class such as the nature of wave-packets, and their behaviour at potential steps and barriers, including quantum tunneling. Fascinating stuff…

When I got home, I started work on my 4E1, Technological Innovation coursework, which took much longer to do than I had expected due to the enormous amount of information I collected on my chosen topic: “An analysis of the key developments and innovations in the optical-disc storage industry”. It was also great since it allowed me to use some of the material I have been developing at the European Patent Office for the last few years on Patents and Technological Innovation… As soon as the coursework has been marked (start of the term), I will post of copy on here to share with you the (I hope…)interesting findings that I put together…! 

Visit to NanoScience Centre

On Thursday 4th Dec, a group of us accepted an offer to visit the university’s Nanoscience centre as Dr Durkan kindly gave us a tour of the facilities, which included lots of Atomic Force Microscopes and STMs… We didn’t visit the clean rooms as I had done in my first year, but it was a worthwhile visit all the same!

London visit

After the visit to the Nanoscience centre, I rushed off to London for a blitz-shopping-visit, and to meet up with my sister and Dad who were in London for a university Open Day… Suffice it to say, my feet hurt considerably after a delightful afternoon of Christmas shopping which included Harrods in Knightsbridge (impressive…), Hamleys, Picadilly, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Tottenham Court and concluded with a quick visit to the Westfield Shopping Centre (Europe’s largest one!) and a quick stop to say hi to Big Ben! And let’s not forget the quick photo in Warren Street which involved jumping off the tube, snapping the photo below and jumping back on!!!

Harrods:

Regent Street and Hamleys:

My good friend Wall-E in Hamleys:

Oxford Street:

Westfield Centre:

Anyway… a lovely day out, even though it was crazy running around without a pause to breathe!

So that concluded the term in Cambridge. Lots and lots and lots of work and sleepless nights, but it’s done… In my next post I’ll try to summarize some of the fun things I’ve been up to this month!

W@

I just wanted to add this post though, as part of the EduBlog awards, to nominate one of the best educational blogs I’ve seen out there, and one I’ve mentioned here before: Alfred Thomson’s blog about teaching computer science. If you haven’t read it, you’re missing out!

So, in line with the rules of the 2008 EduBlog Awards,

My Nominations for The 2008 Edublog Awards are:

Best individual blog: Computer Science Teacher- Alfred Thomson

Best resource sharing blog: Computer Science Teacher- Alfred Thomson

Best educational tech support blog: Computer Science Teacher- Alfred Thomson

Good luck Alfred!

And I’ll be back with updates from me  soon… and of course ‘the Month in Microsoft’ blog post……

Careers Fair

It’s that time of term, where the University Careers Service advertise their annual careers fair. I don’t usually go, but was intrigued this year to take a look… Lots and lots of companies this year… and the usual dodging of questions of the style ‘Are you interested in XYZ?’! The highlight, I think, was the InFusion Development stall… specialized in Microsoft Surface software development, they had even brought one to demo! Among the examples were a Tetris game developed using the recently announced Surface SDK! I’m going to try and get them to come and give a talk in the department…

IET Presentation, Alertme.com

Thursday evening, a last minute decision led Hugo and myself to attend a lecture by Alertme.com on developing a ZigBee ‘Connected Home Product’  (Zigbee is a series of protocols which provide services similar to Bluetooth over short ranges). The talk covered aspects of Home automation, but I thought the lecture was a little general. sadly very few specifics were discussed… Shame. There seems to be an interesting talk coming up in January ‘Manufacturing Flexible Displays’ by Plastic Logic.. mustn’t forget to go…

Lectures

The best lecture this week? Although I really enjoyed the control systems lectures again this week (you may notice a trend…) the best lecture was probably the last innovation lecture which we had on Wednesday, which covered ‘the internet’ as an innovation case study, and concepts such as Market tipping, market types, types of adopters… The guest speaker in the second half of the lecture, John Naughton, professor of Public understanding of Tech. at the Open University, was very good and he raised interesting points about closed and open platforms (comparing the iPhone and the G1…) and he created a good discussion about the evolution of the internet.

Project

Lots of progress this week. I think I’ve finally successfully implemented recognition algorithms based on (1) Canonical Correlations, (2) Gaussian Modelling and the Kullback-Leibler Divergence and (3) Resistor Average Distance (extension of the KLD algorithm). Below is an illustration of data that I collected, showing how well the various systems work and their relative merits…

I’m still trying to implement a system based on Maximally Probable Mutual Modes, and am getting all sorts of errors in Matlab, mostly caused (as always…) by numerical instability… I’ll figure it out… eventually… with my supervisor’s help : )

At this stage, I think I’ll be exploring a new avenue. Having explored several statistical techniques for comparison of image raw-pixel based feature vector comparisons, I’m going to try exploring other representations for the images I have e.g. representing them as a vector of ‘features’, such as those that may be obtained using SIFT (See my first post) or Histograms of Oriented Gradients… More in the weeks to come!

Till next week… or maybe not! I will be spending the whole of the next weekend working on my Michaelmas term project presentation, so it’s unlikely that I will write my blog entry!

W@

Andrew Blake Presentation

This week, we were fortunate enough to have a talk in the department by Andrew Blake, deputy managing director of Microsoft Research Cambridge talking about ‘Markov Models in Computer Vision’. Although a very ‘fancy’ (i.e. hard) sounding title, Andrew presented it in a very clear way using, for example, the weather forecast as an illustration of Markov Models. I got a couple of interesting tips from the talk which may or may not be useful for the project, e.g. a method of segmenting an object from it’s background. One of the more interesting examples was the one where he described how to learn the general shape of objects e.g. a horse from a series of images. More details contained in a Microsoft Research paper here (example on page 5).

For those interested in what Andrew talked about, take a look here at his page. They do absolutely amazing things at Microsoft Research Cambridge!

The poster presentation by PhD students in the department which followed the talk was also amazing, especially the demo I took part in of a ‘automatic tourism operator’ which responded amazingly well to my requests for a four star hotel near the river with a French Restaurant… amazing! Check it out here… you can even download a demo!

Photosynth Competition

Following the posting I made last week about Photosynth, I was very happy to find out yesterday that I won the MSP prize for the competition, which consists of 100 pounds of Amazon Vouchers! Thank you Microsoft!

Geopursuit

I took part on Thursday in the first level of the Shell Geopursuit game… It would have been quite good fun if it hadn’t been marred by technical problems which made the game virtually unplayable for several hours. It’s quite an interesting concept otherwise… Answer clues that point you to a location in Google Earth, then navigate to that location and collect the week’s key code! Quite simple really!

Lectures

No time to go into great depths this week, so I’ll jump straight to the best lecture of the week. I think my ‘highly prized’ award goes to the 4F1 lectures again for their clarity and ‘interestingness’! As I predicted last week, the Bode gain-phase relationship was most interesting and now I can draw Bode diagrams intuitively! Always useful… well…

Project

Some good progress this week, completing my canonical correlations algorithm with some satisfactory recognition rates. I’ve decided it may be more interesting for me to write about the project every two weeks… since I’m running out of time during the week to write it up in the blog…

W@

PS: The astute among you may have noticed that Week in Microsoft is missing… especially after such an important week for MS! I am just so busy with the project… and with a presentation coming up soon… I’ll post a series of links at some point…!

Geocaching

Now by the end of this paragraph, you will probably think that I am totally crazy, but I blame Hugo for introducing me to this amazingly amusing ‘treasure hunt’-style activity.

Basically, geocaching involves ‘running around’ towns/cities looking for clues that answer a set of questions. All the clues that you find help you to calculate a GPS coordinate which corresponds to the location of a hidden ‘treasure’ somewhere in the local area. I was very excited to see that several ‘caches’ were located in Cambridge, so after lunch at the Graduate Union, I convinced Hugo (who was equally as curious as I…) to join me to try out the ‘Cambridge Camouflage’ cache.

Our Holmesian detective skills would have probably been less put to test had Hugo’s GPS and PDA not threatened failure throughout the duration of our exciting search…  Once we had gathered all the clues (many of which were related to the best college in Cambridge) we calculated the location of the hiding place and went there.

Hugo behind Trinity pretending that he had a working GPS..

Unfortunately, we couldn’t seem to find the hidden object! We looked everywhere around the supposed location, up trees, behind bushes, along riverbanks… but nothing. 40 minutes later, we almost gave up… until the hiding place and its contained object suddenly appeared to us… Very satisfying after an interesting search! We wrote our names on the ‘log of visitors’ contained in the ‘treasure’ as one is expected to do…

The cache and treasure were found at last! I look forward to the next one.. there seem to be quite a few in Cambridge If you’re looking for a fun afternoon… I recommend geocaching!

Cambridge, Cambridge and more Cambridge

Many people commented on my new stationery and folders this week, beautifully branded with a gold university logo. I think I’ll keep the source of these lovely items secret for a while longer…

And if anyone if wondering how my PhotoSynthing is going… Check out this ‘mash-up’ of my synths that I put together here!

‘Murder on Air’

Another highlight of the week was Saturday’s theatre performance that I went to: “Murder on Air”, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

The play consisted of a recreation of the atmosphere of an old BBC radio set, commonly used for recording radio-novels. The actors read three of Christie’s radio plays in the style of their original BBC broadcasts – performed on stage in the authentic studio setting with some absolutely stunning live sound effects (how do you create the sound effect of someone being murdered with a nail in the forehead? how do you create the ambience of a large party?)

Hugh Fraser, Sue Holderness and Alexander Bermange (at the props)

It was absolutely amazing, in a very unique setting, with a fantastic group of actors and the added pleasure of the two guest stars performing: Sue Holderness and Hugh Fraser. Hugh Fraser (well-known because of his role as Captain Hastings in Christie’s Poirot TV Series) was stunning and I was very, very happy to see him acting in the flesh! And in addition… he was playing Poirot!

Lectures

A lot of interesting stuff this week again…

- Nanotechnology continued on from last week’s re-derivation of Schroedinger’s Equation, exploring topics such as potential wells, field emission, the quantum harmonic oscillator and the origin of electrical resistance. It was particularly interesting as we start to move on now from the revision of material we covered last year, although some aspects were rather hard/abstract e.g. phonons… and seem to be covered at lightning speed!

- Photonics went on to describe methods of generating slightly more complex diffraction patterns, including the challenges associated with aspects such as the unwanted symmetries and wavelength dependence. The second lecture looked at a different aspect of optics, namely ‘optical correlation’ i.e. allowing us to compare two images (and input and a reference). Two simple methods were explored: the matched filter (brought back ‘lovely’ memories of last year’s digital filter course….) and the joint transform correlator. It was explained that even though the matched optical filter is much simpler to implement, it requires very good optics to align the input and reference images precisely… not easy to achieve!

- Control Systems – I like the pace of these lectures. They are not too fast and the lecturer is very clear. We discussed concepts such as how the effect of disturbances and noise can be reduced in a control system. I think it’s the first time that Sensitivity (1/(1+L(s))) and Complementary Sensitivity (L/(1+L(s))) have been explained to me – it’s really quite simple. Sensitivity affects disturbances and C. sensitivity affects measurement noise! We also discussed the effects  of not having an exact mathematical representation of a control system plant, and how to get rid of non-linearities (the engineer’s nightmare…). I’m very much looking forward to next week’s lectures, deriving the Bode Gain-Phase formula, which is something completely new to me…

- Technological Innovation was again very interesting, covering the types of innovation (e.g. using Schumpeterian S-curves), using as a case study process innovation as opposed to ‘product innovation’ which we covered last week. We were also fortunate to have Gerald Avison from TTP group as our guest speaker this week, demonstrating, amongst other things, a new inkjet can printing technique. Really quite impressive how sharp the digital images on the can were.

- Statistical Pattern Processing: Hmm… what can I say… The content seems to be very relevant to my project, and the lecturer is certainly enthusiastic, but boy is it hard! Granted though, it wasn’t as gruesome as last week’s Expectation maximisation. This week introduced us to the concept of single and multi-layer perceptrons, which are another approach to classification of data sets. Fundamentally, they’re not complicated, but I seem to get somewhat lost in probabilities (priors, posteriors, likelihoods…) and funny symbols. The section on Discriminant analysis though was very interesting, given that I had tried to implement that last week in my project…

Best lecture of the week: Not easy… most were equally good. The best was probably the Control Systems lecture on the detailed effect of feedback, not because the content was particularly exciting, but because the lecturing style was very clear and understandable!

Project

Lots of developments made on the project this week. I think I probably went into too much detail last week, so I’ll provide a more concise summary this week:

• After last week’s concerns, I finally managed to get my canonical correlations algorithm working for four different classes of objects (shoe, tea boxes, biscuit boxes and a lego block)
• The meeting with my supervisor on Tuesday was very fruitful and he pointed me into lots of possible directions.
• We discussed the concept of reducing dimensionality in the subspaces that I am training (see last week’s post). From what I understand it’s mainly a delicate balance between computational speed and recognition accuracy.
• I modified my algorithm to be able to train 1000 classes of objects! Then I supply up to 36 new test images (all of the same object) to my system, and if all works out the algorithm will ‘recognise the object’.
• In fact it does recognise the object… all too well in fact. I’m concerned that my system won’t generalise very well to images that are obtained from environments that are not as artificial as those from the Amsterdam Library of Object Images.

An example of what I’m working with!

• I then played with several factors which I thought would affect my canonical correlation training system: occlusions, background of images, dimensionality of obtained subspaces… Up to now, my conclusion is that CC are a good system, with good robustness to small variations in the mentioned factors… I could go on for hours with graphs and analyses…
• We also discussed other types of algorithms which involve mean subtraction, or modelling my image training sets as Gaussians (or Mixtures of Gaussians), and using the Kullback-Leibler Divergence measure to classify test images. I hope to try to implement those in the next few days..

Anyway, I don’t have time to write more… and it feels like a duplication of my log-book!

The most amusing part this week was the use of ‘pi’ as a variable in one of the papers I was reading today i.e. it was not equal to 3.142. According to that paper, summing the values in the ‘pi’ variables was equal to 1. Some people are strange…!

If anyone is interested in some of the matlab code that I have written, leave a comment and I’ll post some of it…

That’s all for this week!

W@

Another interesting week… Think Microsoft isn’t innovative? This is a very long edition so check out the breadth of this week’s fascinating news/articles… I’m sure you’ll find something interesting! The Microsoft Research topic this week is the “Microsoft SurfaceWare”!

And of course stay tuned for next week’s edition in the light of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference where Windows 7 will make it’s appearance, along with several as yet unannounced products… I can’t wait!!!

Web Application Installer Beta

This week Microsoft announced the ‘Web Application Installer Beta’, as a follow up to  its ‘Web Platform Installer’ launched at the end of September. While the Platform Installer provides web developers with the basic Microsoft components (IIS, Visual Web Developer, SQL Server, .NET Framework), Web Application Installer is a unified installer which aims to help people save time and get ASP.NET (and PHP with MySQL!) applications up and running quickly such as Gallery, phpBB, WordPress…

Check it out if Web Applications are your thing!

Yahoo

Another week, another rumour… Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) declared last Thursday that a deal with Yahoo “makes sense for their shareholders”. An hour later, Microsoft had issued a press statement stating that “Microsoft has no interest in acquiring Yahoo”… I wonder how long this Cat and Mouse game is going to go on for…

bgC3

Hidden under this cryptic name is perhaps one of the most interesting news that came out of the blogosphere this week. Rumour goes that Bill Gates (remember him? he used to have something to do with Microsoft…) has set up a mysterious new company… Its purpose? Techflash, the source for this incredible scoop, described the company’s role as a ‘Think Tank’ to explore new areas of technology at a faster pace. Amusingly this reminds me of my technical innovation lecture on Wednesday, when one of the speakers made a comment that “Microsoft being big reduced their innovation rate”.

Let’s keep an eye out on bgC3 and see what will become of it (My CV is available on request, Bill )… Check out the original article here.

Bill Gates and Pancakes

What can billg and pancakes possibly have in common? Well, interestingly it seems that Bill Gates had a keen interest in Maths (fun!) before setting up that little start-up called Microsoft, and had actually written a paper in 1979 with Christos Papadimitriou on the topic of ‘Bounds for sorting by prefix reversal’ (click to read the paper) more commonly known as the ‘stacking pancakes’ problem

The paper starts with a quote:

The chef in our place is sloppy, and when he prepares a stack of pancakes they come out all different sizes. Therefore, when I deliver them to a customer, on the way to the table I rearrange them (so that the smallest winds up on top, and so on, down to the largest”at the bottom) by grabbing several from the top and flipping them over, repeating this (varying the number I flip) as many times as necessary. If there are n pancakes, what is the, maximum number of flips (as a function f(n) of n) that I will ever have to use to rearrange them?

Sound like a school problem (I still dream of the Towers of Hanoi* project I had to do in Year 7…), but the University of Texas announced this week that they had managed to improve upon this 30-year old problem, producing a better solution than that proposed by Gates. The article announcing their finding can be found here and it’s interesting to read about the applications that this seemingly abstract problem may help solve in computing e.g. finding the shortest path between two processors in a pancake network (Google books extract: Parallel & distributed computing).

A Pancake Network

*Towers of Hanoi: this was one of my first Maths projects. Back then of course (in the stone age of 1998), the Internet was only just becoming a tool for research and learning at home. Few people in class would have thought of using the web to find the simple recurrence relation which was the goal of the project. I remember I spent hours trying to work out the precious formula…

It struck me suddenly though that any child today would simply type in ‘Towers of Hanoi’ in Google, bring up the Wikipedia page and indeed as I suspected, the recurrence formula is there. I found this rather stunning and sad at the same time, and it got me thinking about how often I use Wikipedia nowadays to look up information. But there’s a difference I think. With mum being a teacher, I’ve often seen student’s work handed in to her which is a pure copy of Wikipedia. How sad.

That however reminds me of another of my school adventures… If ever I find a way to get in touch with Mrs J O’brien, who used to teach me Food Technology… I’d love to apologise for that time in 1999 when I handed in my homework on the topic of Vitamin D. I should have been obvious to me that, being in Year 8, she would have guessed that I didn’t know anything about metabolites, prohormones and ergocalciferol… Somewhat appropriately in correlation with the topic I got a D for that particular homework marvel. My only D ever. Believe me, I never copied from Encarta again…

Enough of my nostalgia…

Live Search

Expect to hear a lot about Windows Live next week, but a very interesting LiveSide article hints at what the future may have in store, in particular Windows Live Search.

By the way, for those of you who have not tried out Live Search recently, I recommend that you try out the American localized version by clicking here. The user experience is considerably different to the European one… take some time to explore the homepage. It’s really quite beautiful with the images changing daily…

Check out their article about the changing UI and rebranding of Live Search here.

Craig Mundie at Berkeley

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer (i.e. the one that gets to play with all the fun stuff), gave a talk at UC Berkeley this week. Channel 8 (Microsoft’s Student Forum) has published extracts of his presentation and an interview with Craig about the future of computing, processing and programming.

Craig Mundie: What he dreams up now, you’ll use in 20 years…

His views on the applications of Quantum Computing are very interesting and raise the interesting question of “what do you do with all that power?”. I certainly know what I would use it for… to make my fourth year project run faster in Matlab…grrr!

Another fascinating video on Channel 8 taken during his presentation shows Craig demonstrating ‘Flexible Displays’… Amazingly this was also discussed yesterday in my innovation lecture, in relation to Cambridge Display Technologies… I would love one of these… Santa are you listening?!

Flexible displays are just around the corner; what will we do with them?

Install Font

Not news as such, but a very interesting shortcut that I never knew existed in Vista.

Ever tried installing a new font? Found yourself opening Windows Explorer, going to C:\Windows\Fonts, unzipping your font, dragging the font into the explorer window which hopefully is still on top otherwise you have to perform some acrobatics via the taskbar to get it back on top and then finally having your font installed…

No more! Right click on your downloaded font and click ‘Install’. I can’t believe I never saw that before even though I install fonts several times a week for the desktop publishing I do… I’ve always said that it’s the small things in Vista that make a difference…

Alfred Thomson: Free Microsoft E-books

Grab them while you can! I learnt through Alfred Thomson’s blog, which I recommended last week, that Microsoft Press is celebrating its 25th Anniversary by offering free Visual Studio and Microsoft Robotics e-books . Check them out here before the offer runs out!

Software Tip: Microsoft/Sysinternals Process Explorer

Ever wondered what is actually running on your computer that task manager doesn’t tell you about? Ever wondered what svchost.exe is? Check out this little tool by Sysinternals (a company that Microsoft bought a while back) that that I found out about yesterday. I was very surprised to see what was running when it shouldn’t have been (I’m looking at you, Matlab!)!

You can download it free from here…

Microsoft Research: SurfaceWare

It wasn’t easy to choose this week… there’s just so much to choose from! But in the end, I thought this would be one that many people would find interesting.

Microsoft SurfaceWare is an extension of the Surface concept which I described in previous posts, aiming to extend the capabilities of surface through clever use of the optical infrared hardware and the Surface SDK.

I’ll let the video speak for itself, which uses the example of ‘Level Sensing Glassware Research’… imagine the possibilities!

Very,very cool! Check out the Surface Team Blog here as they go into more details about SurfaceWare!

Next week, I might choose one of the projects by Andrew Blake, a world-famous researcher here in Microsoft Research Cambridge who is coming to give a talk at the engineering department about “Markov Models in Computer Vision”. Sounds fascinating!

Fun Stuff…

A couple of funny moments this week…

Elbot and Microsoft

I found it rather amusing when Elbot, the artificial intelligence that was on BBC news recently, responded to my question “Does that make you sad?”

Apple and French: Perfectly Stupid

Clearly ‘La Pomme’ has not quite grasped the intricacies of the French language as they amusingly described their new MacBook as “Perfectly *stupid*” instead of “Perfectly designed”… And believe me, stupid is a mild translation!

Oh and ‘La Pomme’, I didn’t know that ‘unibody’ was a French word…!

That’s all for this week

W@

I love my timetable this year. Not having any lectures on Mondays drastically changes the week… although this week I still had to go into the department for the first Staff-Student Joint Committee meeting of the year.

SSJC Meeting

The Staff-Student Joint Committee is the student representative body in the Engineering Department here in Cambridge. We covered a range of issues as usual such as the Undergraduate Book Sale and Project deadlines.

But… the most interesting issue for me was the announcement that we have finally managed to have Wi-Fi set up in the Engineering Department! After three years of asking, the ‘dream’ finally came true… A big thank you to the department’s computer officers for the time they must have spent over the Summer setting it up for us. We truly appreciate it. For all those interested in gaining access, follow the instructions here.

Lectures

Having had a full week of lectures,  I now have a good idea which ones are going to be the hardest… Overall, I’m very happy with my choices:

- Nanotechnology was very interesting this week, covering and expanding on some of the material we had done last year in Semiconductor Engineering (e.g. Schrödinger’s Equation, Wave packets, …). Particularly interesting were the examples given that related to Quantum Tunneling, or a probabilistic model for alpha-decay.

- Photonics was also fun, and after so many years of vagueness, I finally understood diffraction gratings/holograms on Tuesday. With lots of visual examples and a good Maths/Understanding balance, this week was very good.

- Control Systems continued being nice and easy this week as we review materials from the first three years e.g. Root-Locus, conformal Mappings and Nyquist diagrams. Friday’s lecture linked all of these together very neatly, culminating on the joys re-acquaintance with and old friend: the Nyquist Stability Criterion.

- Technological Innovation was thoroughly enjoyable (despite it being 3 hours long…) in that the ‘lecture’ was given in a very different format to what we have become accustomed to here in Cambridge. In fact it was more of a workshop/discussion, with nice video intervals, following an interesting case-study this week: Innovation in the PC Industry. As this is one of my big interests, I really enjoyed it… and I was right, most of the material covered is essentially the same as what I spent my time at the patent office doing. I need to find a topic now for my coursework…

- Statistical Pattern Processing: Although I decided not to take this course for credit, I still figured it may be useful, especially for my project and so have decided to attend it anyway… It’s hard though. Probability, probability, probability… This week, topics such as Gaussian Mixture Models and Expectation Maximization were covered… It was most amusing on Friday, when the lecturer commented on the fact that this week’s material was particularly tough, and that next week’s would be simpler. One student was unable to resist the reflex of commenting “huh! Simple” somewhat louder than he expected… which made us all laugh

Best lecture of the week: Photonics’ Tuesday Lecture on Diffraction Gratings/ 2-Dimensional Holograms: some theory yet fun, interesting and varied!

I’m particularly happy this year to see that a number of lecturers (Photonics, Innovation) are using our VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) this year, Camtools, to share some of their lecture resources and additional material, especially following the report that I wrote up last year about it. The extra effort on the part of the Lecturers is very much appreciated by us.

Project

Following an interesting meeting with my project supervisor on Tuesday Morning, I’ve been working on a particular computer vision algorithm based on ‘Canonical Correlations’, setting aside the work I had done last week on the SIFT descriptor.

The particular paper I’ve been concentrating on implementing is this one entitled ‘Discriminative Learning and Recognition of Image Set Classes Using Canonical Correlations’.

‘Canonical correlations’ involve expressing a set of images (of the same object, perhaps under different illuminations or viewpoints) as a linear subspace. This is done for several classes of objects that you want to be able to recognize… and then by performing linear algebra operations (such as Singular Value Decomposition), one forms diagonal matrices of ‘canonical correlations’ which are a measure of ‘similarity’.

After this ‘training’ you have a model for the various object classes you want to recognize, and then you can perform further operations to establish the similarity of new test data which you supply to the algorithm with the image sets you have already trained.

Suffice it to say… it’s quite involved… especially given that the paper also describes a refinement to the system, which supposedly improves recognition. I’ve been testing the algorithm on a subset of images from the Amsterdam Library of Object Images.

As things stand at the moment, I have been building upon the source code for the algorithm found here, having limited success. I seem to be having difficulties establishing what the dimensions of the matrices I am expecting are. In addition I had to solve several problems e.g.

• Why Matlab refused to multiply two matrices together in ‘uint8’ format (I had to convert to ‘double’ in the end)
• Also, many of my temporary matrices in the more complicated extension to the program seem to contain very small elements, which leads to problems in matrix singularities and pages of NaN. Ultimately the algorithm can’t cope with these and so I can’t very the validity of the claim that Discriminant Analysis of Canonical Correlations is better than simple CC.
• The algorithm downloaded from the link above also seems to be unable to cope with a single image training set, and fails unless you supply it with more than one set.
• I had partial success recognising objects when considering two object classes, but when I extended my algorithm to three objects… the system got confused.. much like me really

Aside from that, my supervisor suggested I check out OpenCV, which is an open-source C++ library for Computer Vision which contains many, many pre-made functions. After finally managing to link the libraries in Visual Studio, I managed to put together a few simple examples… Now I should be able to implement my Matlab code in C++ to get them to execute at light-speed!

Anyway… that’s all for this week… Look out for  ‘This Week in Microsoft’ in the middle of the week ]

W@