Graduate School Restarts

UNC Chapel Hill's Iconic Old Well

I haven't blogged about my graduate school experience for a while but a lot has happened. I just spent last summer at the eBay Research Labs. I will write more about my work at eBay later. I will also be attending a research conference in Sidney on December. But the more important thing going with my graduate life is that I transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to finish my doctoral dissertation.

Academic research groups in US higher education institutions are like small start-up companies and they are too subject of acqui-hires by other schools. I'm moving along with my research group from the State University of New York at Stony Brook to the flagship school of the state system in North Carolina to continue on my research. I was counting the number of times that I have moved in the past 10 years and it is certainly more than a dozen times. But this is the time when I have felt the most nostalgia about relocating to a different place. People say that time goes faster after you are a teenager but those 4 years on New York State were a century for me. I learned so much academically and from life, I learned to cook, I learned to drive and wear many other hats. I'm above all extremely grateful that I could meet a lot of the people I met. Had I not met some of these people I would just not be complete today. I lived so much in so little time. I like to look back at all the excitement that I had when I started this blog Graduate School Starts and so I named this post Graduate School Restarts because I'm keeping this same excitement and curiosity for science for this last lap in my graduate school journey.

Montauk - Far far away on Long Island

It seems I like pictures of lighthouses. I think I got a better picture here than the one I took of the Fire Island Lighthouse, also on Long Island. I was actually working with pictures of lighthouses some time back on a vision project so I have seen at least in pictures a lot of lighthouses in several shapes and colors.

Montauk is the easternmost part of Long Island and therefore the easternmost part of New York State. Iconic place in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the first movies I watched after the Dumb and Dumberer-stage of one of my favorite actors: Jim Carrey. Another serious movie I like from him is the Truman Show, of which I made a reference in my earlier post about mosaics (Starry Night Mosaic Art).

Long Island has many niceties that I haven't yet explored, another movie that is coming this year and portraits some of the forgotten glamour of Long Island is The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Mr. Gatsby. I will try to visit a couple of those mansions from the 1920's before the end of the year and post some more pictures.

2300 Jackson Street

The King of Pop, the Greatest Entertainer of All Time, I don't think any superlative can account for the genius of this man born in Gary, Indiana, a small city a few miles away south of Chicago. The neighborhood doesn't look in any way special, it looks just like any neighborhood in a suburb. The town is surrounded by big factories and it doesn't feel like you are getting closer to this seemingly forgotten landmark. It feels like there is usually nobody around but it only takes a minute or two to start seeing cars stopping and fans getting out to take pictures. This is not the Neverland ranch or the Hollywood Walk of Fame, this is the true place where you can relate to Michael Joseph Jackson, the child that grew onto one of the biggest talents humanity has witnessed.

At the intersection of Jackson Street and Jackson Family Boulevard.
Gary, Indiana.

Whiteboard outside the house. Lots of messages already.

Going South

This is an East Coast story: Finally I found some time after a couple of conference deadlines to embark on a road trip from Long Island to Virginia Beach. Stops at Jersey City (NJ), New York City (NY), Newark (NJ), Hamburg (PA), Hightstown (NJ), passing through corn fields in Delaware (DE), Pocomoke City (MD), Virginia Beach (VA), Richmond (VA), Baltimore (MD), Atlantic City (NJ), Jersey City (NJ), New York City (NY) and back to homely Port Jefferson Station (NY).


View East Coast Trip 2012 in a larger map

Old Google maps still a wonderful tool for displaying geographical stories. 

Learning English

I mentioned in some older post about how I learned to write in my native language when I was young [Learning Karate by Waxing Cars],  in this post I will explain how I learned to communicate in a second language: English. I started to get interested in this language when I was a 13-14 year old teenager with lots of spare time. I was good at school but English is something that most of the times you don't get to learn at schools in Ecuador even with proper motivation. I had decided to learn this language as something that might be useful later but most importantly because I saw this as a challenge and something that nobody close to me could do at least at the time. I had no clue about how one teaches himself a second language so I took an English-Spanish dictionary and tried to learn every word brute-force style. Disappointed after some time I tried to learn the grammar rules from another book. Although more motivated by my recent experience with the acquired ability of creating some simple sentences using the few grammar rules I had learned I was still totally lacking any form of speech or listening skills.

ESL videotapes that I used. I just found
them using Google wondering if they
are still available somewhere. This is
apparently a DVD version but I can't forget
the Eagle logo. [Price: $600] [link]
I think their approach is remarkable!

This was around 1998 and while in Silicon Valley there was already a new born Google (maybe Backrub), I didn't have access to computers at the time. Fortunately I had at home an old VHS player and some ESL video tapes that my mother had got some time back from somewhere. My mother never used the tapes herself but she made sure to even photocopy the printed course materials and went as far as to retype some of the material using a typewriter (I hope I don't  get my mother into trouble because of some possible case of copyright infringement). Look at the picture in this blog post and the caption. The Speak to Me course is 90% about practicing in front of the screen by repetition, these are not lectures. (Again another example related to [Learning Karate by Waxing Cars] although this time took me longer to realize about the success of this attempt). This educational resource was treasure to me. I went through every one of these more than a half dozen videotapes twice. This time I was very satisfied with the results and was eager to take it to a next level. Unfortunately most private English classes in Ecuador are either very expensive or a well elaborated scam. My parents just could not afford it. So I forgot about English for a while.

Two years later in my last year (senior year?) of high school I was fortunate enough to have assigned a native level speaker as my English teacher, Ms. Martha Dockter. To my own surprise I realized that I could already engage in casual conversation with her in English without major trouble. I had not met any other English speaker before. Ms. Martha was very helpful on correcting a lot of mistakes on my writing and speech, I learned tons with her. She passed away in 2008 (†). Her obiturary reads that she was the daughter of a Reverend from Mansfield, Ohio who travelled to Ecuador with his wife to do missionary work. I'm sure there are many more students like me grateful for her teachings. This is my story about how in a time before the internet I got to learn a second language. Finding the educational resources was harder than today but finding the willingness for self-education was still as hard as it is today.

Learning Karate by Waxing Cars

I will introduce here an article by Peter Norvig that I recently read and involves a discussion about Artificial Intelligence, Statistical Models and Machine Learning, but before posting the link I will introduce the discussion with an example:

When I was a child I learned how to write proper Spanish by following what I will refer in this article as the karate-kid or Mr.-Miyagi approach. I present here two approaches to learn and improve your basic writing skills.
1. Take a class on grammatical and orthographic rules.
2. Read lots of grammatically and orthographically correct text, not bothering about rules.

By using the first approach you can get a sense of how to construct correct sentences early on, but the effects depend a lot on having rules hard-coded in your brain very heavily, practicing with those rules with lots of examples can certainly reinforce the rules to be learned.

The second approach does not involve learning rules at all but just reading lots of text data, let's say books. After reading lots of correctly structured sentences and words you can develop a sense of how a correctly structured sentence or word feels like without being conscious about rules. In other words for some cases you will be using rules almost without consciously thinking about them due to the amazing ability of our brains to find patterns. This second approach is the data-driven approach or as I prefer to call it, the karate-kid approach because I suspect this is the path Mr. Miyagi would have chosen if he had to mentor a pupil about how to write properly.

Mr. Miyagi asking his pupil to wax cars over and over again.

The field of Artificial Intelligence used to follow the first approach. If you want a smart computer, then hard code rules on it so that it can behave as desired. Hard-coding rules doesn't scale very well so you might want to learn the rules from data or adapt the rules over time but ultimately people realized that you might not really need to care about rules at all, as long as you just care about the system behaving as desired.  This is the topic of discussion in the article by Peter Norvig in response to Noam Chomsky's remarks where Chomsky apparently derided machine learning researchers. You can read it in the following link, I highly recommend it: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Google New York

Google invited the Computer Science graduate student community at Stony Brook to visit their offices in New York last December. Most of the people were busy giving finals and wrapping up their Fall semester, still we managed to go there with a group of fellow graduate students. Weather was very cold but no snow yet at the time.

The tour was guided by both a Google software engineer and a recruiter. The company is moving from their Times Square location to two new buildings and although they only occupy a couple of floors on those buildings, the place still looks huge. From the outside the building we visited looks like any other building in Manhattan. This came in contrast to the Google-land looks of their main offices in California but once you're inside those buildings the feeling is the same, an open place full of fun and geek culture in every bit.

We attended a Tech Talk given by a Software Engineer and Ph.D. alumni of Stony Brook working on Google Local Search. He explained a lot of the challenges he has to deal with in his daily work and how they collect, interpret, present and more importantly search through geo data. Before the talk we played a trivia game where we could win precious Google merchandise. I managed to get away with the two items shown in the picture of this post: A Google mug and an Android plush doll. I got the green Android by completing the phrase of Edsger Dijkstra: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes" and I won the mug by remembering the original name given to the Google search engine when it was first put online: Backrub.

After the talk and with some Google goodies in hand we had lunch with the rest of employees in the nice restaurants that have made this company famous for the free and good food. Beyond Google we didn't do much this day. We went to Washington Square Park with a group of friends and did some shopping nearby. Google New York seems like an awesome place to work although for me I came to realize that most of the work in my field of interest is happening in the west coast.

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.

First Semester of Graduate School So Far

I'm right now at my Teaching Assistant office hours, I will blog about my experience as a recent graduate student. I will concentrate on the things I've been able to enjoy here that I wouldn't have found if I had stayed at home.

First thing I enjoy is leading recitation sections on foundations of Computer Science. This is an undergraduate course and most my students are avid to learn new stuff and give their best. I also learn a lot from them while I improve my English speaking and communications skills. This is the first time I have the chance to teach a class completely in English and I like that. This is an experience I really enjoy.

As part of a research community I've joined the Computer Vision seminar series where I have been able to meet several people interested on image analysis and visual algorithms. The Computer Vision seminar is a highly interdisciplinary group of people working on Image Analysis, Image Retrieval, Learning Theory, Pattern Recognition and Psychology and Visual Cognition. I also recently joined the Vision and Digital Media Lab, a group that is also close to the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture and Technology (cDACT), a joint effort between the Department of Computer Science and the Art Department. I see a lot of good interesting things coming out of this group.

More broadly as part of the Computer Science community I've been able to attend several talks from invited speakers working on several fields. For instance today there was a jaw-dropping talk given by Prof. Ge Wang from Stanford University, who is working on Computer Music Research. He's the co-founder of the startup company that developed the Ocarina iPhone application, which basically turns your iPhone into a musical instrument and allows you to listen what are other performers playing around the world. You can see a demonstration here.

As a student I'm enrolled in three classes, being Theory of Computation probably the hardest because of the abstract and sometimes complex concepts we should learn in order to make formal proofs. My most enjoyable class this semester is probably Recognizing People, Objects and Actions, so far we've implemented the bag-of-words model for image classification, principal component analysis for face recognition (eigenfaces) and the project I'm working on will likely be worth a blog entry in the future. I'm also taking a graduate course in Computer Graphics where we are covering from the basics to more complex things such as open problems in computer graphics.

On the non-academic part of my life as graduate student. I have been able to visit Manhattan several times. Central Park and the New York Aquarium were the best places I've visited so far. I also enjoyed my first concert in Madison Square Garden listening to the rock band KISS. And I'm pretty sure there are many more things to come.

Last but not least, I've made several friends from different cultures here and I have enjoyed the long talks I've had with many of them. Although I'm surely forgetting to mention something important, I have to say that life so far is not perfect but surely I'm getting the opportunities I came looking for.

Graduate School Starts

It's been not so long since I moved to the United States for Graduate School. I've decided to start blogging and share the experience here. I'd like to contribute with some knowledge and worthy experiences and leave some of the small talk for twitter. I posted here a picture of the SBU Computer Science department building entrance. It means a lot to me, since this is going be my second home away from home for the upcoming years.

I don't have big hopes of having enough time to post daily or even weekly but I have high hopes of making this blog something worth reading. It's my third attempt to blogging. My first blog was a mix of a personal and tech blog in Spanish, I stopped updating it because in part I lost interest and then I stopped paying the hosting and domain.  My second attempt was an institutional blog at my undergrad school, I used to blog about several topics of local interest of my undergrad community, it is still online but not maintained anymore.

So far I've found Stony Brook to be a quiet and nice place surrounded by forests and a few steps away from the beach. On the other hand it's only a few miles away from New York City. The University campus is wonderful, lots of nature and modern buildings (Check the Health Sciences Building in the second picture!). The community is full of international students and faculty and lots of people interested in arts and sciences.