Today I finished reading “Atlas of Human Anatomy” by Frank Netter
Paper – Leading birds by their beaks: the response of flocks to external perturbations
Today I read a paper titled “Leading birds by their beaks: the response of flocks to external perturbations”
The abstract is:
We study the asymptotic response of polar ordered active fluids (“flocks”) to small external aligning fields $h$.
The longitudinal susceptibility $\chi_{_\parallel}$ diverges, in the thermodynamic limit, like $h^{-\nu}$ as $h \rightarrow 0$.
In finite systems of linear size $L$, $\chi_{_\parallel}$ saturates to a value $\sim L^\gamma$.
The universal exponents $\nu$ and $\gamma$ depend only on the spatial dimensionality $d$, and are related to the dynamical exponent $z$ and the “roughness exponent” $\alpha$ characterizing the unperturbed flock dynamics.
Using a well supported conjecture for the values of these two exponents, we obtain $\nu = 2/3$, $\gamma = 4/5$ in $d = 2$ and $\nu = 1/4$, $\gamma = 2/5$ in $d = 3$.
These values are confirmed by our simulations.
Read – The Elves of Cintra
Today I finished reading “The Elves of Cintra” by Terry Brooks
Read – Fundamentals of Shooter Game Design
Today I finished reading “Fundamentals of Shooter Game Design” by Ernest Adams
Studying – Creating retro futuristic illustrations with Photoshop
This month I am studying “Creating retro futuristic illustrations with Photoshop”
Bit of a short course. 15 hours of pre-recorded video and some exercise files.
Paper – End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars
Today I read a paper titled “End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars”
The abstract is:
We trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) to map raw pixels from a single front-facing camera directly to steering commands.
This end-to-end approach proved surprisingly powerful.
With minimum training data from humans the system learns to drive in traffic on local roads with or without lane markings and on highways.
It also operates in areas with unclear visual guidance such as in parking lots and on unpaved roads.
The system automatically learns internal representations of the necessary processing steps such as detecting useful road features with only the human steering angle as the training signal.
We never explicitly trained it to detect, for example, the outline of roads.
Compared to explicit decomposition of the problem, such as lane marking detection, path planning, and control, our end-to-end system optimizes all processing steps simultaneously.
We argue that this will eventually lead to better performance and smaller systems.
Better performance will result because the internal components self-optimize to maximize overall system performance, instead of optimizing human-selected intermediate criteria, e.g., lane detection.
Such criteria understandably are selected for ease of human interpretation which doesn’t automatically guarantee maximum system performance.
Smaller networks are possible because the system learns to solve the problem with the minimal number of processing steps.
We used an NVIDIA DevBox and Torch 7 for training and an NVIDIA DRIVE(TM) PX self-driving car computer also running Torch 7 for determining where to drive.
The system operates at 30 frames per second (FPS).
Read – Usagi Yojimbo Volume 28: Red Scorpion
Today I finished reading “Usagi Yojimbo Volume 28: Red Scorpion” by Stan Sakai
Read – Bachelors Anonymous
Today I finished reading “Bachelors Anonymous” by P.G. Wodehouse
Read – The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success
Today I finished reading “The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success” by Andy McNab
Read – Jarka Ruus
Today I finished reading “Jarka Ruus” by Terry Brooks
Read – Fundamentals of Vehicle Simulation Design
Today I finished reading “Fundamentals of Vehicle Simulation Design” by Ernest Adams
Read – American Connections
Today I finished reading “American Connections: The Founding Fathers. Networked.” by James Burke
Read – Distrust That Particular Flavor
Today I finished reading “Distrust That Particular Flavor” by William Gibson
Paper – Complexity of Shift Bribery in Committee Elections
Today I read a paper titled “Complexity of Shift Bribery in Committee Elections”
The abstract is:
We study the (parameterized) complexity of SHIFT BRIBERY for multiwinner voting rules.
We focus on SNTV, Bloc, k-Borda, and Chamberlin-Courant, as well as on approximate variants of Chamberlin-Courant, since the original rule is NP-hard to compute.
We show that SHIFT BRIBERY tends to be significantly harder in the multiwinner setting than in the single-winner one by showing settings where SHIFT BRIBERY is easy in the single-winner cases, but is hard (and hard to approximate) in the multiwinner ones.
Moreover, we show that the non-monotonicity of those rules which are based on approximation algorithms for the Chamberlin-Courant rule sometimes affects the complexity of SHIFT BRIBERY.
Studying – Creating a technical illustration cutaway
This month I am studying “Creating a technical illustration cutaway”
In-person workshop/class with instructor feedback on work.
I looooove maps.
Maps and cutaway illustrations have always fascinated me.
Now I get to spend an entire month learning how cutaway illustrations are put together and designing some of my own.
Read – The 80/20 Principle and 92 Other Power Laws of Nature
Today I finished reading “The 80/20 Principle and 92 Other Power Laws of Nature: The Science of Success” by Richard Koch
Paper – Self-Assembling Systems are Distributed Systems
Today I read a paper titled “Self-Assembling Systems are Distributed Systems”
The abstract is:
In 2004, Klavins et al.
introduced the use of graph grammars to describe — and to program — systems of self-assembly.
We show that these graph grammars can be embedded in a graph rewriting characterization of distributed systems that was proposed by Degano and Montanari over twenty years ago.
We apply this embedding to generalize Soloveichik and Winfree’s local determinism criterion (for achieving a unique terminal assembly), from assembly systems of 4-sided tiles that embed in the plane, to arbitrary graph assembly systems.
We present a partial converse of the embedding result, by providing sufficient conditions under which systems of distributed processors can be simulated by graph assembly systems topologically, in the plane, and in 3-space.
We conclude by defining a new complexity measure: “surface cost” (essentially the convex hull of the space inhabited by agents at the conclusion of a self-assembled computation).
We show that, for growth-bounded graphs, executing a subroutine to find a Maximum Independent Set only increases the surface cost of a self-assembling computation by a constant factor.
We obtain this complexity bound by using the simulation results to import the distributed computing notions of “local synchronizer” and “deterministic coin flipping” into self-assembly.
Read – Superheroes
Today I finished reading “Superheroes” by John Varley
Read – Jeeves and the Impending Doom
Today I finished reading “Jeeves and the Impending Doom” by P.G. Wodehouse
Read – The 80/20 Manager
Today I finished reading “The 80/20 Manager: Ten ways to become a great leader” by Richard Koch
Paper – Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics
Today I read a paper titled “Shape Animation with Combined Captured and Simulated Dynamics”
The abstract is:
We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances.
The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms.
In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the actor is built from real captures that allows seamless combination and simulation with virtual external forces and objects, in which the original captured actor can be reshaped, disassembled or reassembled from user-specified virtual physics.
Instead of using the dominant surface-based geometric representation of the capture, which is less suitable for volumetric effects, our pipeline exploits Centroidal Voronoi tessellation decompositions as unified volumetric representation of the real captured actor, which we show can be used seamlessly as a building block for all processing stages, from capture and tracking to virtual physic simulation.
The representation makes no human specific assumption and can be used to capture and re-simulate the actor with props or other moving scenery elements.
We demonstrate the potential of this pipeline for virtual reanimation of a real captured event with various unprecedented volumetric visual effects, such as volumetric distortion, erosion, morphing, gravity pull, or collisions.
Paper – Implementation of interaction between soft tissues and foreign bodies using modified voxel model
Today I read a paper titled “Implementation of interaction between soft tissues and foreign bodies using modified voxel model”
The abstract is:
Interactive bodies collision detection and elimination is one of the most popular task nowadays.
Collisions can be detected in different ways.
Collision search using space voxelization is one of the most fast.
This paper describes improved voxel model that covers only area of collision interest and quickly eliminates collisions.
This new method can be useful in real time collision processing of different rigid and soft bodies grids.
Read – Utterly Uncle Fred
Today I finished reading “Utterly Uncle Fred” by P.G. Wodehouse
Paper – Avatar-independent scripting for real-time gesture animation
Today I read a paper titled “Avatar-independent scripting for real-time gesture animation”
The abstract is:
When animation of a humanoid figure is to be generated at run-time, instead of by replaying pre-composed motion clips, some method is required of specifying the avatar’s movements in a form from which the required motion data can be automatically generated.
This form must be of a more abstract nature than raw motion data: ideally, it should be independent of the particular avatar’s proportions, and both writable by hand and suitable for automatic generation from higher-level descriptions of the required actions.
We describe here the development and implementation of such a scripting language for the particular area of sign languages of the deaf, called SiGML (Signing Gesture Markup Language), based on the existing HamNoSys notation for sign languages.
We conclude by suggesting how this work may be extended to more general animation for interactive virtual reality applications.
Paper – Perceiving Motion Cues Inspired by Microsoft Kinect Sensor on Game Experiencing
Today I read a paper titled “Perceiving Motion Cues Inspired by Microsoft Kinect Sensor on Game Experiencing”
The abstract is:
This paper proposed a novel method to replace the traditional mouse controller by using Microsoft Kinect Sensor to realize the functional implementation on human-machine interaction.
With human hand gestures and movements, Kinect Sensor could accurately recognize the participants intention and transmit our order to desktop or laptop.
In addition, the trend in current HCI market is giving the customer more freedom and experiencing feeling by involving human cognitive factors more deeply.
Kinect sensor receives the motion cues continuously from the humans intention and feedback the reaction during the experiments.
The comparison accuracy between the hand movement and mouse cursor demonstrates the efficiency for the proposed method.
In addition, the experimental results on hit rate in the game of Fruit Ninja and Shape Touching proves the real-time ability of the proposed framework.
The performance evaluation built up a promise foundation for the further applications in the field of human-machine interaction.
The contribution of this work is the expansion on hand gesture perception and early formulation on Mac iPad.
Paper – Effective Clipart Image Vectorization Through Direct Optimization of Bezigons
Today I read a paper titled “Effective Clipart Image Vectorization Through Direct Optimization of Bezigons”
The abstract is:
Bezigons, i.e., closed paths composed of B\’ezier curves, have been widely employed to describe shapes in image vectorization results.
However, most existing vectorization techniques infer the bezigons by simply approximating an intermediate vector representation (such as polygons).
Consequently, the resultant bezigons are sometimes imperfect due to accumulated errors, fitting ambiguities, and a lack of curve priors, especially for low-resolution images.
In this paper, we describe a novel method for vectorizing clipart images.
In contrast to previous methods, we directly optimize the bezigons rather than using other intermediate representations; therefore, the resultant bezigons are not only of higher fidelity compared with the original raster image but also more reasonable because they were traced by a proficient expert.
To enable such optimization, we have overcome several challenges and have devised a differentiable data energy as well as several curve-based prior terms.
To improve the efficiency of the optimization, we also take advantage of the local control property of bezigons and adopt an overlapped piecewise optimization strategy.
The experimental results show that our method outperforms both the current state-of-the-art method and commonly used commercial software in terms of bezigon quality.
Read – The Science of Discworld III
Today I finished reading “The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch” by Terry Pratchett
Read – Pandora in the Crimson Shell: Ghost Urn Vol. 6
Today I finished reading “Pandora in the Crimson Shell: Ghost Urn Vol. 6” by Masamune Shirow
Read – Conan Volume 18: The Damned Horde
Today I finished reading “Conan Volume 18: The Damned Horde” by Fred Van Lente
Read – First King of Shannara
Today I finished reading “First King of Shannara” by Terry Brooks
Read – Death at the Excelsior and Other Stories
Today I finished reading “Death at the Excelsior and Other Stories” by P.G. Wodehouse
Studying – Drawing on the iPad with SketchBook Pro
This month I am studying “Drawing on the iPad with SketchBook Pro”
In-person workshop at local art school over on Zelzah
I love SketchBook Pro on my Surface. Time to start practicing with it on my iPad Pro.
Paper – Deep Remix: Remixing Musical Mixtures Using a Convolutional Deep Neural Network
Today I read a paper titled “Deep Remix: Remixing Musical Mixtures Using a Convolutional Deep Neural Network”
The abstract is:
Audio source separation is a difficult machine learning problem and performance is measured by comparing extracted signals with the component source signals.
However, if separation is motivated by the ultimate goal of re-mixing then complete separation is not necessary and hence separation difficulty and separation quality are dependent on the nature of the re-mix.
Here, we use a convolutional deep neural network (DNN), trained to estimate ‘ideal’ binary masks for separating voice from music, to perform re-mixing of the vocal balance by operating directly on the individual magnitude components of the musical mixture spectrogram.
Our results demonstrate that small changes in vocal gain may be applied with very little distortion to the ultimate re-mix.
Our method may be useful for re-mixing existing mixes.
Still no solid food…
Weight loss goal for March also achieved.
Read – The Girl in Blue
Today I finished reading “The Girl in Blue” by P.G. Wodehouse
Food poisoning
Ate some bad Orange Chicken from a local Chinese takeaway for lunch yesterday.
Got a bad dose of food poisoning.
Is there ever a good dose of food poisoning?
We are talking full evacuation.
On the positive side, I’ve met my weight loss goal for both January and February this year. Yay! Go overachieving me!
Read – The Impact of Science on Society
Today I finished reading “The Impact of Science on Society” by James Burke
Paper – Sound Representation and Classification Benchmark for Domestic Robots
Today I read a paper titled “Sound Representation and Classification Benchmark for Domestic Robots”
The abstract is:
We address the problem of sound representation and classification and present results of a comparative study in the context of a domestic robotic scenario.
A dataset of sounds was recorded in realistic conditions (background noise, presence of several sound sources, reverberations, etc.) using the humanoid robot NAO.
An extended benchmark is carried out to test a variety of representations combined with several classifiers.
We provide results obtained with the annotated dataset and we assess the methods quantitatively on the basis of their classification scores, computation times and memory requirements.
The annotated dataset is publicly available at this https URL .
Read – Straken
Today I finished reading “Straken” by Terry Brooks
Read – Zero to One
Today I finished reading “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future” by Peter Thiel
Read – Thriving on Vague Objectives
Today I finished reading “Thriving on Vague Objectives” by Scott Adams
Paper – Android Note Manager Application for People with Visual Impairment
Today I read a paper titled “Android Note Manager Application for People with Visual Impairment”
The abstract is:
With the outburst of smart-phones today, the market is exploding with various mobile applications.
This paper proposes an application using which visually impaired people can type a note in Grade 1 Braille and save it in the external memory of their smart-phone.
The application also shows intelligence by activating reminders and/or calling certain contacts based on the content in the notes.
That darn cat!
Just some of the things I have shouted at my cat in the past year:
“Mao! I swear to God, if you knock Thor’s hammer off the desk one more time I will castrate you with this Tesla coil!”
“Will you PLEASE stop biting on the laser focusing lens!”
“Drop it! Drop it! What have you got in your mouth? WTF!? Where did you even find this [Nixie tube]!?!”
“Mao! Would you PLEASE not turn off my workstation when getting down from the desk!”
“Mao! Mao! Stop biting on the mains wiring you little shithead! Stop. Putting. Your. Paws. In. The. Electrical. Outlets!”
“Mao! Get off the piano!”
“Mao! Stop dropping toys in the water chiller reservoir [for the laser rod]!”
“Mao! Get off the laptop!”
“Mao! Get out of the fridge!”
“Mao! Get out of the server!”
“Mao! Get out of the flour storage bins!”
“Mao! Get out of the cat food bins!”
“Mao! Stop talking to Cortana!”
“Mao! Get off the pasta!”
“Mao! Don’t sleep on the bread!”
“Mao! Stop playing with the electric guitar!” I said this one as I stumbled in to my office at 4AM to find out what the noise was.
“Mao! I swear to God if you explode playing with that I will clean up your remains with the cheap kitchen towels I reserve for the dog vomit!”
“Mao! Do not interrupt the Linux kernel build by sleeping on the keyboard or I swear you’ll be made personal assistant to Torvalds in your next life.”
“Mao! Keep your paws out of the path of the laser!”
Read – Zero History
Today I finished reading “Zero History” by William Gibson
Paper – Are Game Platforms suitable for Parkinson Disease patients?
Today I read a paper titled “Are Game Platforms suitable for Parkinson Disease patients?”
The abstract is:
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative movement disorder that affects more that 6 million people worldwide.
Motor dysfunction gradually increases as the disease progress.
It is usually mild in the early stages of the disease but it relentlessly progresses to a severe or very severe disability that is characterized by increasing degrees of bradykinesia, hypokinesia, muscle rigidity, loss of postural reflexes and balance control as well as freezing of gait.
In addition to a line of treatment based on dopaminergic PD-specific drugs, attending neurologists strongly recommend regular exercise combined with physiotherapy.
However, the routine of traditional rehabilitation often create boredom and loss of interest.
Opportunities to liven up a daily exercise schedule may well take the form of character-based virtual reality games which engage the player to physically train in a non-linear and looser fashion, providing an experience that varies from one game loop the next.
Such “exergames”, a word that results from the amalgamation of the words “exercise” and “game” challenge patients into performing movements of varying complexity in a playful and immersive virtual environment.
In fact, today’s game consoles using controllers like Nintendo’s Wii, Sony PlayStation Eye and the Microsoft Kinect sensor present new opportunities to infuse motivation and variety to an otherwise mundane physiotherapy routine.
But are these controllers and the games built for them appropriate for PD patients? In this paper we present some of these approaches and discuss their suitability for these patients mainly on the basis of demands made on balance, agility and gesture precision.
Read – Summer Moonshine
Today I finished reading “Summer Moonshine” by P.G. Wodehouse
Paper – Recognition of Emotions using Kinects
Today I read a paper titled “Recognition of Emotions using Kinects”
The abstract is:
Psychological studies indicate that emotional states are expressed in the way people walk and the human gait is investigated in terms of its ability to reveal a person’s emotional state.
And Microsoft Kinect is a rapidly developing, inexpensive, portable and no-marker motion capture system.
This paper gives a new referable method to do emotion recognition, by using Microsoft Kinect to do gait pattern analysis, which has not been reported.
$59$ subjects are recruited in this study and their gait patterns are record by two Kinect cameras.
Significant joints selecting, Coordinate system transforming, Slider window gauss filter, Differential operation, and Data segmentation are used in data preprocessing.
Feature extracting is based on Fourier transformation.
By using the NaiveBayes, RandomForests, libSVM and SMO classification, the recognition rate of natural and unnatural emotions can reach above 70%.It is concluded that using the Kinect system can be a new method in recognition of emotions.
Read – Plum Pie
Today I finished reading “Plum Pie” by P.G. Wodehouse
Boom! Chicka! Mao! Mao! – 23
When you own a cat (called Mao):
“Mao! Stop attacking the robot arm.”
Read – Antrax
Today I finished reading “Antrax” by Terry Brooks