“Structure methods for image and signal analysis” course at our CS department is getting nicer and nicer. Last week we have Vladimir Kolmogorov invited, talking about techniques for energy minimization in complex graphical models. This week Victor Limpitsky will give a talk named “Image Segmentation: beyond Graph Cuts”. Btw, if you are interested in this course, slides from all the lectures are available here (unfortunately, in Russian language only).

Funny observation: it seems that Vladimir hadn’t been giving math talks in Russian for a quite long time. His Russian is still perfect, but he doesn’t remember even Russian equivalent for “limit point” or “real number”. He asked people who was sitting in front of him to translate various math words from English into Russian during the whole talk.

Btw, have you heard about Logicomix? It’s a comic book about Bertrand Russell, famous logician and mathematician. It covers a lot of interesting stuff including introduction to intuitionism and formalism, Russell’s connections with Kurt Gödel, Henri Poincaré, David Hilbert and other legends of mathematics. And all that great stuff is available in a nice form of a comic book, both online and in hardcover.

Currently there is an interesting problem at the TopCoder Marathon Match. Given a set of 2D points, your task is to enclose all the points with at most M circles and to minimize the total area of all the circles used. Apparently, this problem has no straightforward optimal solution, so various discrete optimization techniques have to be involved. We’ve tried evolutionary optimization yesterday, but we haven’t succeeded yet. More good ideas need to be involved =)

Forget to mention. I’m going to spend significant part of the next two years of my life in the computer science and data analysis school hosted by Yandex together with MIPT. Of course, my primary objective is to learn a lot of new cool stuff about machine learning, optimization theory and discrete math. But the other important thing is that I will definitely meet some new awesome people there. So, you know, it’s probably gonna be quite interesting.

Btw, really great people like Albert Shiryaev and Alexey Chervonenkis will lecture there. That’s someting I can’t miss.

Last few month I was participating in the NVidia CUDA lecture & seminar course hosted by the NVidia company together with CMC department of the MSU. NVidia offered certificate to every participant who will successfully solve all the proposed assignments or use CUDA in his (or her, I’ve seen some girl who did it) course project. There were no place for CUDA in my course project (at least, I though so), so I’ve written the following 5 programs in C++/CUDA.

1. Find all the roots of the piecewise-linear function with A LOT of points. It was the first and the most simple one.
2. Calculate haar wavelet coefficients for the 1D signal.
3. Implement simple real-time raytracer with support for planes, spheres and triangles (also with texturing).
4. Numerical heat equation solution.
5. Optimization of a given a program that performs image filtering using convolution with large kernel.

Need to say, some of this assignments were quite interesting. Problems that have pretty simple general parallel algorithm can be very hard to implement on stream computing architecture efficiently. Anyway, performance boost worth it.

So, now I’m happy owner of that piece of paper (blame Steve Jobs for the bad iphone camera quality):