Saturday, June 12, 2010

Impressions After my Second Semester

I stopped from blogging for quite long. Last semester I was quite busy with Lambda Calculus for my Programming Languages class, where I had the opportunity to struggle and win. I understand now a lot of the principles behind type checking and have a more formal understanding of the properties that can be proven about languages and in particular about programming languages. But still, struggling and winning is probably the best valuable lesson I got from this class, one to be proud about.

The project around which my time and efforts revolved around last semester was an image analysis project related to popularizing the use of visual attributes for general purpose image understanding. My Computational Vision and Learning courses were synergistically helpful on this purpose throughout last semester as well. With nice results at hand, now I'm looking forward to new challenges.

This far I've concentrated on the things that got me interested on the first place: Image Understanding, Digital Media, Computational Learning and Visual Computing in general. But aside of that I've been concentrating on a set of graduate courses where the focus lies on the theory side: This far I've been in Theory of Computation, where in addition we also had a focus on Computational Complexity Theory. I also took the Logic class where although we dove mostly on the mathematical side I could also get the insights from the philosophical view. And I'm looking forward to attend the graduate class on Algorithms. After all "Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed."
-Albert Einstein to Werner Heisenberg.