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.