The Fire Island Lighthouse

Fire Island Lighthouse

Fire Island is a smaller island connected to the south shore of Long Island. I have been there a couple of times already but so far I have not been able to get there before 3pm so that I can get into the top of the lighthouse. I have not been able to make it even before 4pm so that I can make it to the museum that is located in the building besides the lighthouse. Still there are some nice afternoon views and you can more than often get to spot deer. At least to some of my friends this seems to have become  the place for when you are getting bored at home and feel like driving.

Interesting fact is that Fire Island is one of the islands that are part of the Long Island and New York City barrier islands. Another of these islands being Coney Island for which I also dedicated a blog post some time back "The New York Aquarium and Coney Island". I will update this entry once I get to enter the lighthouse and the museum (and this might not happen for quite a while), for now I just wanted to share the picture I took with my fancy smartphone.

Colorado Springs and Kinect

I have again neglected my blog for sometime due to deadlines and other aside work. I just realized I never got myself some time to write about my visit to Colorado Springs for CVPR 2011 during the summer. Actually there is not much for me to say about Colorado Springs since I hardly visited any places beyond the hotel so I will just mainly refer about one particular paper presented in this conference.

CVPR 2011 might perhaps be remembered as the conference where the research paper Real-time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from Single Depth Images (The Kinect paper!) by Microsoft Research was presented. (Ok, this is obviously an overstatement, quality of research at this conference is really high) Microsoft Kinect is a product that has had a big impact that goes beyond gaming. This is a very iconic example of Computer Vision that works and is readily available to the world.

Wearing a cap and being Kinect captured

Kinect has inspired hackers (http://kinecthacks.net/), artists (http://artandcode.com/3d/) and general technology enthusiasts since its introduction some time ago. It has also inspired researchers to create new algorithms that can clean the data captured by the Kinect sensors and make the most out of it or just play with it (here http://acberg.com/kinect/ some kinect hacking in Matlab by Alex Berg, one of my vision professors in Stony Brook). The picture I included in this blog post was ironically captured in our fancy Motion Capture Lab using the inexpensive capturing device from Microsoft. People here have also been working on Kinect with applications to Music performances and Motion identification. (More links to be added later...). Update: Interactive Music using Kinect: http://tamaraberg.com/papers/kinect_music.pdf

Although I didn't stay for the whole week of the conference I also presented a paper in CVPR 2011 about automatically estimating photo-quality and user engagement for photographs titled: High Level Describable Attributes for Predicting Aesthetics and Interestingness. Our goal was to use Computer Vision to recognize what are the kind of photographs that users think are cool without explicitly having to ask them what is cool? (Note: Users might not even realize what are the individual things that make them judge something as cool or interesting).