Hey, have you ever seen George Klein’s SLAM engine in action? I can’t even call it awesome. It’s better. And it’s not just the algorithm itself. Just look into possibilities it opens.

“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 =)

Anyway, check Wordle out!

It’s very funny, when a week before you should install and run a large-scale vision system you’ve been working on for the whole last year, you find that 10 rack computers your company has bought for that system have their PCI slots (where you were going to insert a video grabber) blocked with a video card cooler. Very-very funny.

But I was going to share some links, anyway. Here is what you should do:

1. Check out this amazing video with high-speed robot hand.
2. Look through this page made by Ke-Sen Huang. It contains links to all the proceedings from SIGGRAPH and some other CG conferences.
3. If you are some happy owner of the QuadroFX NVidia GPU, you can check out new real-time ray tracing samples based on OptiX, fresh NVidia technology which is a part of NVidia Application Acceleration Engine.
4. Say thanks to me.

I hope we’ll figure out how to solve the PCI problem in a limited amount of time we have. Then, after our system is successfully started, I will write a few posts describing our technologies and what we’ve come through last year. The only thing that can stop me now is death because of the lack of sleep.

Sergey Puchin wanted it. It’s now available to him and other guys. Short list of RSS channels and blogs I’m reading every day. I will add some items to it soon, but it’s still useful. Enjoy!

It is under the “Tags” block, btw.

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.

Yoav Freund, one of the people behind the boosting approach, has created a special site for machine learners - http://themachinelearningforum.org. You can read more about his motivation and ideas about this site here. I wish this site will become a great place for the whole ML community. Place where people can share interesting ideas, discuss various approaches and get information about state-of-art ML research. It’s something I really miss.

Also check out this funny video from intel. Science and engineering also has its own rock stars!

Towards my previous performance posts:

Shawn Hargreaves wrote a post describing the way good microbenchmarking of language or platform features should be performed. As I can see, he likes idea of using LINQ for mean and variance calculations too :)

Blogs about machine learning:

• http://hunch.net/
• http://slycoder.wordpress.com/
• http://yaroslavvb.blogspot.com/

Some funny stuff about theorem proving: http://www.wolfbane.com/jazz/proof.htm

Genetic algorithm for producing beautiful artwork: http://oranchak.com/photosome/results/

See augmented reality in action - http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality