Well, I haven’t post anything here, being quite busy. It was mostly because of the fact I have quit from my previous job at BS Graphics R&D department. And now I’m a software engineer at the Yandex company, largest Russian search engine which holds about 60% of the search market in Russia (Google, btw, has only about 20%). In Yandex I’ll be working with the image search team. At first I’ll be mostly involved in infrastructure related tasks, but in time I’ll probably start doing some interesting stuff closely connected to machine learning and computer vision areas.

Here are some facts about Yandex, just in case:

• Yandex has its own computer science and data analysis school which is available for students for free. Really awesome people like Alexey Chervonenkis or Albert Shiryaev read lectures there. And Maxim Babenko’s course on effective algorithms and data structures is the best I’ve ever seen.
• Yandex hosts Internet Mathematics contest where interesting tasks somehow related to web-search are offered to participants. The goal of the contest this year is to predict the rate of traffic congestion based on previous observations. And last year contest was about learning a function that can predict the relevance of the document with respect to search query (it was just like the contest currently hosted by the Yahoo Labs). 
• Yandex is one of the two main sponsors of the TopCoder 2010 event (the other one is the U.S. National Security Agency).

 I’ll make a post with photos from the main Yandex office (which looks really great) quite soon. You stay connected :)

As many of you know, SIGGRAPH 2009 has just finished. Every year a lot of really amazing stuff happens there. And this year was not an exception at all! So, in this post I want to highlight some things that seem like something-that-can-not-be-missed stuff to me.

• Futuristic computer-human interaction. Touchable holography, augmented and virtual reality. And something that is really funny - scratchable input.
• NVidia has released OptiX, SceniX and CompleX. You have waited for it for a long time and now you’ve got it! CUDA-based real-time raytracing API together with scene management and scalability tools is (will be soon) available to graphic developers for free.
• Scalable visualization with NVidia Quadro Plex.
• Metal printing of your own 3d models with Shapeways.
• OpenGL 3.2 was released.

I’m pretty sure that there were a lot of another amazing stuff there that I’ve missed. Unfortunately, I’m not a SIGGRAPH attendee, so the only sources of information available to me are my rss subscriptions to different news channels. If you have found something cool at SIGGRAPH, post comments with links here. I’ll be glad to see some other mind-breaking innovations. I love all that future-is-now things a lot!

Update:

SIGGRAPH Slides from NVidia have been made available there.

This week I have visited a few lectures of the Microsoft Research guys during the Microsoft Research summer school on high performance computing at MSU. There were a lot of interesting stuff at the school. The main idea behind the school was that Von Neumann architecture is too old and its limitations become more and more obvious. So, computer science field (its programming part especially) must be “reinvented” soon. As an alternative to the classic imperative programming, MSR guys propose using functional languages like Haskell. So, they have talked about Haskell (and, especially, about parallel programming in Haskell) a lot. And, of course, Simon Peyton-Jones, one of the main developers of the Haskell language and lead designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, was there. He is very inspiring and cheerful man, and his talks are really great! But the talk I liked most was not about functional programming. It was about research papers and talks (it was kind of a meta talk). Slides and other stuff (like videos) related to that talk are available here, but I’m still going to list some of the major (or just interesting to me) theses:

1. Writing articles and giving talks is not about anything but sharing ideas.
2. Have an idea (it’s not necessary for your idea to be a fantastic one) => write an article.
3. One article <=> one clear idea.
4. Use a lot of examples! Every definition or statement (especially the one with complicated math) becomes much more clear if it has an associated example.
5. Related work section should be placed just before conclusion. Other works can distract your reader from your (good or not) own work (this idea was quite surprising to me).
6. Be as clear and concrete, as possible.
7. Write in active voice, use agents (like process, algorithm, iteration etc). For example, “this algorithm selects best classifier” is much better than “best classifier is selected”.
8. Good talk contents: motivation (20%) and key idea (80%).
9. You should select something you want your readers to remember after listening to your talk. Concentrate on that thing. It’s absolutely normal to cover only part of your paper at your talk.
10. Adding outline to your slides makes no sense but wastes the time of the talk.
11. Again, examples are your main weapon!
12. Do not show the total amount of slides to your audience (numbers like “6 of 95” can make people very sad).
13. Always finish in time. And it’s better to save some time for questions than to show all the slides to your audience.
14. Be enthusiastic! Do not make excuses! Do not afraid to be afraid of your talk (everybody does)!

I hope reading this will help someone with his (or her) paper or talk. And I hope that person will look through the original slides or watch the video by himself. It is worth all the time spent.

Yesterday I've participated in pattern recognition section of PhD summer school on Scentific Computing. It's a web conference event. Several universities participate in it, including Waterford University of Technology and our Moscow State University. There I have a talk about my last research work: accelerating boosting with genetic algorithms. That was my first experience of web conferencing, but everything went ok as I think.

If someone is interested, slides from my talk are available there. AFAIK conference site will appear soon. It will contain both the presentations and theses of the presented works. There should be some interesting stuff there. For example, I'd like the talk about feature set compactness of the training set and its relation to k-NN classifiers by Dmitry Potepalov.

Last saturday Physics Department of the Moscow State University was celebrating it's traditional holiday: Physicist Day. Every year something funny, strange or scaring happens to me on that day, but the last time was special. Here is a list of things I remember:

Today I’ve visited an interesting event - Freeman Dyson’s lecture at the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dyson is American physicist and mathematician, famous mostly for his work in quantum field theory, but also for some very interesting and provocative thoughts about science, religion, life and everything (today he said something like “I’m too old for science, but young enough for philosophy”). Many of his ideas are about our future: look at Dyson sphere or Dyson tree. But today his lecture was related to global warming, nuclear weapons and genetic engineering.
Here is a short list of what I’ve learned today:

• Dyson thinks that genetically modified plants can solve all the problems with global warming. Some people say that’s crap but who knows? I’m not a specialist.
• There probably was a quite long pre-evolution period when simple life forms (consisting of a few self-replicating moleculas) shared their advantages to each other (like in open source) to improve life quality and become more sophisticated organisms.
• 6 thousand years ago there were a lot of lakes and trees in Sahara. And if global warming will strike, trees and lakes can come back.
• Genetic engineering can become for us something like computer games in the future. Imagine a genetic game when you should grow the most powerful lizard in a week. Sounds great, but a bit strange.
• Nuclear strikes were not the reason Japain surrendered in WWII.

There was a lot of other amazing stuff, but I’m just too lazy to post it there. It’s much more better to listen him, than to read about it here. He worked with Albert Einstein and my favorite physicist (do you have a favorite physicist?) Richard Feynman, btw.