Exp Motion

Moving

2011-08-03T20:23:00.000-07:00

I've been using google+ to share interesting bits of info and cat pictures.

Cheating to defend the cheaters

2011-07-10T23:22:00.000-07:00

The Romanian educational system is structured to closely resemble the education system in France. Every year all high school graduating students have to take a national baccalaureate exam. The exam has faced several changes in the last 20 years and overall it remains a very important milestone in a student's education. Over time the baccalaureate has also become more of a strenuous effort in

CG 101

2011-06-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you can get links to cool movies outside of facebook ... a short history of CG characters in movies from lnrdshelby on Vimeo.

Politics

2011-06-12T23:04:00.000-07:00

For someone that's quite skillful at digging out information I have to admit I am struggling with a deficit. I can not find any useful facts about a supposedly major political decision in Romania: the territorial and organizational restructuring. As newspapers report, the restructuring will to divide Romania in larger regions than the current "counties" or judete. Let me back up a little bit and

perspiration vs. inspiration

2011-05-23T22:03:00.000-07:00

Adam Savage (of Myth Busters fame) gave (one of the) the keynote talk(s) at Maker Faire. Needless to say: Maker Faire was amazing The theme of the day was inspiration and how everything around us can become a muse. I can't say it blew my mind away, especially since afterwards I watched Adam's 2009 Maker Faire talk on failure. I am probably biased because in the 2009 talk he talks

better late than never

2011-05-11T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've been boycotting the The New Yorker for a while. It was a wimpy boycott where I refused to read it and more importantly reference any of their articles. Why? Because they had a lousy strategy of dealing with new e-readers, in particular the ipad. You could download the new yorker ipad app but even with a paid printed subscription you actually had to pay full price for each edition. Luckily

craigslist: a love/hate story

2011-04-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

I am looking for summer housing in a new city (san fran) and of course I went (and was even pointed) to the best site on the market: Craig's List. After almost two weeks of reading a ton of useless info, sending a gazillion emails, checking out addresses and so on I am left exhausted and very much annoyed. Now don't get me wrong I love the idea behind craigslist.com: access to information from

prepare for the turker invasion

2011-03-22T18:52:00.000-07:00

I am a big fan of Mechanical Turk. Last time I was saying that mturk paper writing is not yet there. Well I was probably wrong. 1. At CMU in the HCI department there are some folks that showed that wikipedia articles are about as good as mturk group written articles and somewhat better than mturk independent writers. 2. Someone in Germany came up with an algorithmic way to assign Hits to write

Breaking boundaries - Part 2

2011-03-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

This is a second post about outreach work so you can read the first post (Breaking boundaries - Part 1) or the short intro below. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I mentioned a while ago that I've been working with some wonderful young ladies from Gwen's Girls here in Pittsburgh. Recently, together with several other grad students we submitted a paper on our most recent work with the ladies from Gwen's

self referencing

2011-03-14T11:50:00.000-07:00

Today's date can be found (courtesy of pi searcher) at position 651,081 of pi counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted. Others have searched for more meaning in Pi (as the pi searcher faq shows) so try searching for 424242 and make your own deep connections about the meaning of life. Happy pi day!

Martisor

2011-03-01T07:10:00.000-08:00

I received a couple of virtual Martisoare (which is the plural of Martisor) so I figured I'd share one with you. If you're interested in the pronunciation check this out. La multi ani de 1 Martie!

Why, didn't you know?

2011-02-28T08:12:00.000-08:00

There is no such thing as a Gruffalo Oscar but by the power invested by myself to myself I can mention it in this blog. Overall I have to admit I liked ALL of the animated shorts nominations and honorable mentions for different reasons. I found the Gruffalo to be particularly charming in a childish sort of way. So what is a Gruffalo you wonder? It turns out the Gruffalo was first a children's

Speaking of data: Upload your dataset to the Google Public Data Explorer

2011-02-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

Google labs had (for about two years now?) a bunch of public datasets with pretty flash graphs to go along at the Google Public Data Explorer. I hadn't played with the data before and today, as I was checking the google blog, I ended up spending about 2 hours lost in graphs. One data set is based on flu queries and the claim behind is that it could be an indicator for pandemics. As the flu

love thy data (and don't fall madly in love with your hypothesis)

2011-02-14T13:56:00.000-08:00

I have the strange feeling that 90% of the talks I listen to nowadays are about data-driven this or data-driven that. Maybe I am biased and end up going to a particular set of talks but there clearly seems to be a trend to have data-driven everything. In computer science, data-driven can mean lots of things (who knew there's something called data-driven programming?). For graphics and computer

Breaking boundaries - Part 1

2011-02-10T16:11:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a while ago that I've been working with some wonderful young ladies from Gwen's Girls here in Pittsburgh. Recently, together with several other grad students we submitted a paper on our most recent work with the ladies from Gwen's Girls (wearable electronics workshops). The paper, Breaking Boundaries: Strategies for Mentoring through Textile Computing Workshops, will be presented at

mon ADN est tout a fait fascinante

2011-01-28T12:36:00.000-08:00

I recently got results from 23andme and I am going through a DNA analysis frenzy. First of all let me start with the beginning. 23andme is a commercially available service that decodes part of your DNA. They analyze single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) so don't think Dolly the Sheep dna sequencing. The results are fairly reliable for certain disease and traits and there's clearly some

Mechanical Turk review

2011-01-24T12:50:00.000-08:00

Sometimes one gets the urge to experiment. Sometimes that can be done by polling people at parties. Alas, parties in grad school are low on people and usually not easy to come around. Fortunately a wonderful thing came about from the field of human computation. And no, it's not paper writing. Amazon has this great service called Mechanical Turk (after the famous so called "computational machine"

Coming up soon

2011-01-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

I didn't disappear off the face of the earth and I didn't forget about this blog. I was just on a research driven adrenaline high. Now that things have settled a bit I am back to the good old blog. I need to write about India, I need to write about a cool experiment (or two) and a couple of other things. It's good to be back

Someone's Christmas present

2010-12-23T14:09:00.000-08:00

It's probably the nicest I've ever wrapped a present. I should've put it under the tree but it's a dangerous world out there. A beast can get you at any point.

PhD bashing

2010-12-19T15:18:00.000-08:00

I've read a bunch of articles in the past year bashing the entire PhD process. The most recent from the Economist goes on about things we all know: it's not financially sound in most situations to go for a PhD when a masters makes a similar profit cut in considerably less time. The title of this post is misleading because I love my PhD program. Here's my biased view: I am young, I am low

Deadline heartbreak and glass blowing zen

2010-12-17T20:42:00.000-08:00

Sometimes no matter how much work you've put into a project, no matter how good your results are, and no matter how hard you tried to make it, you miss a deadline. Overall, it's a silly thing. Rationally you know it's a silly thing. It's a conference/workshop deadline, lots of other deadlines to come. Alas, the pre-deadline sleepless nights and the extreme exhaustion don't make you think

because it's winter

2010-12-09T23:22:00.000-08:00

It's been snowing in Pittsburgh and the weather turned from cold to freezing. It's clearly SIGGRAPH season and soon enough people will start bringing their inflatable mattresses and tents into the office. In some ways it's good SIGGRAPH is in the winter, I definitely don't feel bad for spending 14 hours in the office. Anyways, to reminisce about that time of peace and quiet called fall here are

round and round

2010-11-22T21:31:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning for a while to write about Mind Hacks. I have to admit that Mind Hacks is probably my primary source of science odds and ends. Don't get me wrong, the science is pretty hard core and not odd per se. The subject matter is sometimes on the eclectic side of things. Last week I read on how mummies were used as a drug (even by the Greeks). One very recent post talked about a new

simulation simulation simulation

2010-11-22T16:53:00.000-08:00

Once or twice a year I get really excited about a movie from a CG/research perspective. I am not exactly an Avatar fan but I recognize they raised the bar when it comes to CG movies. The animation/mocap blend was stunning to say the least. I will keep my personal feelings about the content of the movie and the artistic direction personal. This fall it's all about Tangled. The science behind it

JK Rowling is a neuroscientist and other ramblings

2010-11-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

To follow up on science on the web reviews, the Neuroskeptic has a nice post about serotonin and insomnia, actually a special case of insomnia combined with depression: "early morning waking". Unlike the majority of Neuroskeptic's posts this one doesn't go into details about one article (criticizing it or not) but rather paints a more generic picture giving some insight about a potential

halloween

2010-11-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

It's pretty hard to figure out what character I was going for if you haven't watched Toy Story 3 (even then it's not a piece of cake :))

diary of a wimpy runner: take 2

2010-10-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

I took a 2 week hiatus from running after removing my wisdom teeth (yes, all 4). I have to admit that I wasn't in major pain or any huge discomfort but I did follow the recommendation of not doing any intense physical effort. This means that this week when my target was supposed to be 15 minutes of running I can barely pull off 12 minutes with 2 x 2 minute breaks. I also moved from running

Science on the Web

2010-10-24T13:09:00.000-07:00

As a PhD student I religiously rely on Google Scholar for articles. But what about science news? In high school and even in college I used to love reading the New Scientist. In college I used to read Wired but never had a subscription. In grad school 90% of the science facts I read are online (excluding text books but even most of those are online). A couple of years ago in a group of young

Why I quit facebook

2010-10-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

I. Because of the useless information overhead I generally liked facebook as a media sharing environment [1]. Unfortunately beyond a link here and there the majority of the information in my news feed ended up being from that girl that I knew in kindergarten with lengthy discussions on how she got a dog (and then had to take him to the vet because he got a rash and then the nurse [2] was not

airplane reading

2010-10-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

When I travel I stock up on old, unread, New Yorkers. I am usually at least a month behind with the reading so 3-4 magazines can keep me busy for a couple of hours. Last weekend I finished my allotted magazines on a flight to California so on the way back I picked up from the staff recommended shelf of the Oakland Barnes and Nobles Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno. I read most of the book on the

women in cs

2010-10-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

I was trolling around the web for some women in cs blogs and came across the Female Computer Scientist's blog. I probably spent a good couple of procrastination hours going through her posts and links and comments. There's something to be said about how much more you can say under the cloak of anonymity about grad school. I for one am grateful that these blogs exists because they bring forth

fall crop

2010-10-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

In the old blog I mentioned how A. and I started this whole gardening business by planting crocuses in the spring (which were promptly eaten right before blooming by bunnies). This year we also planted 3 big pots with tomatoes, tomatillos and peas. I know you're not supposed to empty an entire seed pack of tomatoes in pot and hope it will all turn well but hey we were testing the

quick note

2010-10-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

I went through this a couple of times on various systems and since I never seem to remember what I did here it is: Installing the Flash Plugin for a 64 bit Firefox: -> download the file for your system (a tar ball - for me was the 64 bit linux- which will turn into a libflashplayer...so) -> extract the libflashplayer.so ->move the file libflashplayer.so to where your firefox resides /usr/lib64/

diary of a wimpy runner

2010-09-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

I'm not much of an athletically inclined person and the lack of exercise combined with the grad student "free food is always good food" mantra is taking its toll. What I mean by not athletically inclined is that I loathe running. I usually try to make it into a deeper issue about how uncomfortable it is to have both feet in the air and how the impact forces just waste energy and how much better a

pink coding

2010-09-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I sat through a talk by Dr. Erin Fitzgerald who was involved in the design of the upcoming Computer Scientist Barbie. I have mixed feelings about a pink computer science Barbie so I was pleasantly surprised that the talk didn't make it sound like this is great PR for the field. It's a little bit of PR and a tongue in the cheek comment that online voting is quite biased. After all, an

added benefit

2010-09-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

There's definitely an art in conveying information and though I don't have time to elaborate on my thoughts about visualization in general, I figured the chart above from Information is Beautiful deserves attention. The app itself was not working (Sept 24 2010) but a static image is available AND they have a google doc with the references to the journals which is quite interesting if you have the

eggplant rasvangy

2010-09-08T20:00:00.000-07:00

I discovered the secret to south indian cooking: coconut flakes + curry leaves + tamarind paste. I always felt that all the indian dishes I make taste very much the same (roommate calls it redneck curry). Today I can proudly say I managed to cook something that could pass for a decent south indian dish. Once I perfect the process (i.e. cook the dish a couple more times) I can post the recipe.

Jamming

2010-09-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

A quintessential part of grad student life is cooking. Two years ago, among our 18 people incoming class at least 12 claimed they like to cook and since then I think the number is getting closer to 15. Why is cooking so appealing for engineers/computer scientists? First of all, cooking nowadays is the fashionable thing to do (and we all know how in tune with the trends computer scientists are -

e-prime

2010-08-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

In response to my very first post where I stated that I plan to use this blog as writing practice, A. challenged me to write a bit in e-prime. After all, what better way to practice writing than to try different styles? On my way to work this past couple of days I spent a good amount of time trying to reformulate sentences with the sole purpose of removing versions of the common verb that

Mixed style animation

2010-08-25T18:15:00.000-07:00

When it comes to animation I know close to nothing. Yes, I know, graphics and animation go hand in hand, not to mention the fact that I am even working on some animation related projects. When I say I know nothing about animation I am referring to the artistic choices and style decisions. Where do they come from (except from general inspiration). Can the principles for making these stylistic

Keeping track of things

2010-08-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

It took me a while to give in and start a new blog. The old one, Virtual Babylon, was a collaborative endeavor that overtime has run its course. An even older attempt at blogging is now buried deep under billion of bytes and years of random password changes (clearly, forgetting the password is a sign that the relic of a blog should stay buried). So what is the purpose of this new, shiny, blog?