Summer Time - California and Silicon Valley

Arriving to San Francisco International Airport doesn't really show San Francisco, from there you have to take a BART train in order to get to the downtown. The feeling that you get after getting off from one of the subway stations and you first see the real San Francisco can hardly be described, so I took this picture right after getting there:

Yes, at the beginning of this summer I traveled to California. I attended CVPR 2010, one of the main conferences in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. The world of datasets keeps growing and getting richer, most notably imagenet and the scene understanding database.  I could also see the demos and the insightful research that's going on in every major research center. This was a really insightful experience that I will try to use in the best way I can for my own research projects.

Going back to the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley brought back many good memories. I visited the headquarters of AMD in Sunnyvale where one of my classmates is working now for the summer. Since they bought ATI, they have been heavily involved with graphics and this is reflected in many of the details of their facilities although overall still keeps the feeling of a traditional software company. In contrast, I then visited Google and for my surprise lots of people outside of my old group could still recognize me. I had lunch there and then spent some time playing games. By night I and some friends visited Castro Street which looked more crowded than it used to be, night life in Mountain View is apparently getting better.

Right after my trip to California I shortly visited my home country. This was probably the last time I could see my sister in the following two years since she's planning to move to France to get a masters' degree in Biology. I had a very good time there although I didn't have the chance to visit many places. But as I have always thought, I prefer the people over the places. Now I'm back to research and work at Stony Brook, which is also good.

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.