Three weeks of blah

So, I just realized that it has been a very long time since I've posted. It feels like the last three weeks have been days and days of the same stuff. At least in the school department. My wife's been wearing a foot brace for a week now, and so that involved setting up a doctors appointment and some other out of the ordinary events.

But, school has been time consuming and not very exciting. I have a final demo day for a group project in my graphics class. It's been very time consuming and pretty frustrating, but it is looking kind of cool. It's a program that loads 3D models and renders them like they were drawn with different styles of artistic strokes. I'll try to post the program itself or at least some screen shots at some point... maybe I'll do that now. Ok, I just made a couple screen shots. These just demonstrate a couple of the possibilities with our program. I moved the camera to show that these are real 3D models. The other cool thing is it does this all in real time, so you can move around the 3D world and have everything rendered like pencil art, or whatever. Once we have this presentation on Thursday, all I have left is to finish my other final project which is way too complicated to try and describe here. Have a great week.

Mom, california, and school

Another quick update. First, I picked up my mom from the airport (Providence airport) last night and she will be staying with us until Monday which is fun and exciting since we hadn't seen either of my parents since graduation last May. It's hard though because I have school all week still which I will discuss in more detail in just a minute. My mom went to work with Jess today which should make the day more enjoyable for both of them.

To answer a question...the Pixar internship is paid, and it in itself is a huge answer to prayer. Before I was offered the position I knew it was paid, but I had no idea how much or any of the other details. Well, it turns out it pays better than any other internship that I know of! And since Jessica's 36 hour a week nanny job has been supporting us all year, it will be very good to have some more income that will help us survive the next year until graduation next May. So, that's a huge praise...oh and the position has a "standard" work week of 50 hours. Which could be interesting if I get a job there after school (they expect at least 50 hours from their employees). But, for now it is a blessing as well since anytime over 40 hours is time and a half. Also, since 50 is standard for them, you get paid for 50 even if you don't put in quite 50. So, that is good for me too. And, housing for interns is provided by Pixar in furnished intern apartments. So, I will have a roommate or two, but I don't have to worry about the cost.

Also of note. My school year ends the second week of May. Between then and when I leave for Pixar, Jessica and I will be moving into a new apartment. It is just about .5 a mile from where we currently live, but I think it fits us better than our current one. Mainly, I think the cost of utilities will be a lot more manageable. And there is A/C for the hot/muggy parts of summer. I'll try to remember to post pictures once we move.

Finally, I wanted to update a little about the current status of school. I've had a lot of programming projects this semester and that won't change until the semester is finished. I'm trying to finish the last regular assignment that I have. And then I will be working very hard on two final group projects. One for each of my classes. If you are at all interested in the work that I've done in my graphics class this semester, they are listed on the assignments page for the course. It can be found here. Also, since each of these assignments were based on one or more research papers form the last few year, the papers themselves can be found here. Image Analogies was the hardest, followed closely by Photon Mapping (my output at right). I won't go into details about these unless one of you want to know. But, they make some cool pictures. Both of my final projects are going to be a TON of work, but hopefully I will do the best I can and get it all done in the month that is left of school.

Pixar...I hope!

I'm submitting my resume for an interview with Pixar next week. They will be on campus doing recruiting for summer internships. I really hope it works out...this is my dream internship. I'll make this post quick, I also should have a demo reel of some of my work for the interview, so I spent some time in the last 24 hours getting some of my work more put together, then threw it all into a video. Here it is, enjoy the music...odd choice, I know!

How exciting!

I do have readers! 2! Well, at least I know someone sees this. And just so you guys know, I read your as well...and have them both in my google reader list.

So, for an update. First it snowed last night. It was so peaceful and nice, then this morning...rain and frozen mush all over everything. Oh well. And we are supposed to have flash-flood conditions today and tomorrow.

Enough about the weather. So, first cool thing I found recently. A firefox extension that turns photo galleries into something truly amazing. It's called PicLens and if you have Firefox you can see what it does and get it for free at: http://www.piclens.com. (If you don't have/use Firefox, you should!) Here's a preview:


Also another firefox note, I really like this theme.

Ok, more personal now. Classes have really started and are extremely busy. Both classes are more work than I anticipated, but, in my graphics class we get to make some really pretty pictures in just a couple weeks. Using a technique called Photon Mapping. Essentially we model the characteristics of real photons bouncing around a scene and then render that on the scene. more about this hopefully once I get there. For now I'll say that I've been very slightly involved in work that has continued from my Vision final assignment last semester. Just a reminder that I did my final project on processing video for a multi-touch display system. Here's the final video output that I produced at the end of the project. And I will also link to the final research paper that I wrote and turned in. It is pretty technical, but feel free to at least look at the very professional format and the nifty pictures.

Obviously, with what I had to work with, my results were not perfect. The idea was that we simply want to keep track of any fingers touching the screen over a series of consecutive frames. Since I finished this project another Master's student has started his Mater's research by taking my results and some other ideas and beginning to create the software to actually allow us to use our multi-touch table. I will probably be helping out occasionally with this project, and it just might be the research I do for my degree also.

Here's the paper: http://cs.brown.edu/people/reid/VisionFinal.pdf

And the video:

How sad!

Deep down I knew it really wasn't a good idea to start a blog when I was pretty sure that this would happen. I have no motivation to post. I honestly don't know if a single person has found this blog. (Except Selam who left me a comment.) So, if you read these, would you mind leaving a comment, I enjoying keeping people up to date on stuff, but it's hard if I don't know if there are very many people even here to update.

Well, classes started back up this week. Break was long and nice. I didn't have classes from 12/12 until 1/23! Jessica and I went to Disney World for almost 2 weeks! It was very relaxing and wonderful to get a real vacation. Now I'm back into classes and assignments. I am taking CS224 - Interactive Computer Graphics, and ENGN291 - 3D Photography and Geometry Processing. Both classes are graduate level (200+) and will be challenging! Lots of fun.

Coming to a close

The end of my first semester of grad school is almost at an end. My last assignment is due tomorrow, along with my last class. I've enjoyed both of my classes so much this semester! I hope you are all doing well. Christmas is approaching very rapidly. Fortunately, I am finished with the shopping that I have to do on my own. I am really looking forward to this break and getting some time to spend with friends, and hopefully getting to explore New England a little more. I don't start classes again until 1/23!

Our apartment is decorated for the holidays, and we both REALLY like how it turned out. Hopefully I can post a picture or two of our apartment.

I have no idea who has found this blog, so feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail and let me know you found me.


Well, that's all for now, back to work on my final project for Vision.

Really cool technology

I am starting to get involved with some research projects that are happening inside our graphics research group here at Brown. I am even working on this for my final project in my vision class. But, I thought I'd show you some of the amazing things that have already been completed in this area of research. The research topic is multi-touch displays. This allows direct interaction with a computer with more than just one mouse pointer as you can easily see in the videos that I've included below. These first videos are from Jeff Han, who is a researcher at NYU. Here is a demo he performed when he first unveiled his research to the public.



And another that shows more possibilities.



Similarly, another researcher, Johnny Lee at Carnegie Mellon has done some cool things that are related to multi-touch displays. But, here is another one of his videos that is a little bit different topic, but still very interesting.



Hope you guys like these videos. Another related project is the "Microsoft Surface" and there is a really cool video about it here:



That's it for now.

Computer Vision

I thought I'd share some of my school work with you. As I previously mentioned, I'm in a computer vision class that has been really interesting. We've had 4 assignments this semester and each one has taught us more about certain areas within Computer Vision. Our last assignment was to create a face tracker using a techniques we learned in class called particle filtering. So, after I completed the assignment and turned it in, I thought it would be fun to let other people see what I am doing, so I exported the images to a video and then uploaded it so you could see it. Here it is, I will explain a little more after the video.


Reid's face tracker

The orignal video was provided to us by our professor. The man in the video is a professor at McGill University in Montreal. The dots on the video represent the "particles" that help track the face. Each dot gets tested to see how likely it is the face. This "likelihood" is represented by the brightness of each dot on the video. I then use the average of these points to estimate where the face probably is. That is represented by the red dot and rectangle.

As you can tell it does an OK job of tracking the face over the course of the video. It isn't perfect but I'm pretty proud that it works at all.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Time

Well, time is amazing, sometimes it is so fast, and other times quite the opposite. We've been in Rhode Island for almost 4 full months! Amazing. Jess and I just this evening were discussing how much has happened in the last 5 years, even just the last 1 year! Well, now that I'm almost 1/4 done with grad school I thought it might be fun to try and keep everyone up to date on life in New England and my life at Brown.

I really am enjoying my classes and teachers. The professors are outstanding. Here are links to my 2 classes if anyone cares:

• Introduction to Computer Graphics
  (short description: This course offers an in-depth exploration of fundamental concepts in 2D and 3D computer graphics. It introduces 2D raster graphics techniques, including scan conversion, simple image processing, interaction techniques and user interface design. The bulk of the course is devoted to 3D modeling, geometric transformations, and 3D viewing and rendering. A sequence of assignments in C++ culminates in a simple geometric modeler and ray tracer.)
• Introduction to Computer Vision
  (short description: How can computers understand the visual world of humans? This course treats vision as a process of inference from noisy and uncertain data and emphasizes probabilistic and statistical approaches. Topics may include perception of 3D scene structure from stereo, motion, and shading; image filtering, smoothing, edge detection; segmentation and grouping; texture analysis; learning, recognition and search; tracking and motion estimation.)

Just less than 3 weeks left in the semester. I have a couple decent sized projects left and then I will be off until late January. Hopefully a few people will read this blog, once they know about it, but since I don't know who that will be, I don't know exactly how I should "aim" my information. I'd love to talk about the cool new technologies that I keep finding out about, or the awesome program I made last week for my graphics class. But, I'll probably try to steer away from anything too technical. Let me know if you want more specifics on anything.

I don't want to make these too long, so, that's it for now.
Have a great day.