More news at 11!

Honours, Semester 1 (during semester 2)

Uni study’s been going quite swimmingly of late: both my units of study went pretty well (insofar as I got HDs in them); thesis on the other hand, has only really just started to take off. My research is into the computer vision task fo object detection (for example, finding faces in images), in particular, I’m working on improving the scheme built into the Intel OpenCV Library (Haar Classifier Cascades, if you’re at all interested) by having them consider colour.

One of the deficiencies I’ve discovered during my research is lack of sufficient real-world colour face datasets to perform detection upon: whilst I need in the order of 2000 faces (1000 to train upon, 1000 to test upon), the largest useful academic set is an order of magnitude smaller. For this reason I’m developing my own set. My current intention is to assemble the data set entirely from Creative Commons-licensed data (e.g. from Flickr and Wikipedia) and to release the resultant set under CC licenses too. I expect I’ll give a lightning talk at LCA on this, I’ll also dump a blog post here somewhere about what sort of data I’d like donated.

Summer of Google

One thing that’s looking like it will derail my Honours work slightly happened not too long ago. I applied for a Software Engineering Internship at Google Sydney back in July, and didn’t hear much about it. In late October, however, I very suddenly got contacted about it, and interviewed for the position, and quite happily, I was offered a job. This, amongst other things, involved dropping (almost*) everything for the summer, and moving to Sydney within two weeks, which I guess I’ve done somewhat successfully.

So I’m now working at Google until sometime during the first two weeks of semester (!). My current project involves working on [redacted], to make [redacted] do [redacted]; in related news, the new Sydney offices are pretty damn cool, the food is excellent, and the work is fun. I’m really looking forward to the rest of my time here.

*I guess the most important thing to mention here is that I’m still spending my week-and-a-bit in Wellington for Linux.conf.au 2010, and that I’ll still be running the Open Programming Languages Miniconf there. I can hardly wait!

Point 1? I got an Honours scholarship. Yay me! Secondly? I got my final mark today (for Functional Analysis), a very satisfying 95 (better than my previous marks for the semester by a long way). This means that I now officially have sufficient credit to graduate to a Bachelor of Science (though this is mostly a formality, I’ve been doing Honours study for two weeks now), and will do so in two weeks time. Awesome!

The third bird? My Honours thesis topic has been allocated. Put as vaguely as possible, it’s about augmenting a machine learning-based object detection system (for images) to use colour images instead of black and white. My supervisor is Mike (my ACM-ICPC coach, as it were). I’ll _try_ and explain it better once I’ve done a bit more reading than I have so far…

Normal service to be resumed later,

–Chris

More Uni!

First up, I’ve started on my Honours year! Isn’t that exciting? As I’ve learnt this week, the next 12 months for me will consist of 4 coursework units, and a research thesis. This semester, it looks like I’ll be studying Embedded Systems (yay! I get to program some microprocessors! Whoo!), Computing in Context (a research-intensive unit in HCI), and possibly one other, depensive on what the unit outline for it looks like. My thesis I’m not so sure about, given that the process by which we get assigned supervisors hasn’t occurred yet. Currently, I have a pile of 12 project areas for my perusal, from which I must rank 6 proposals by order of how much I want to study them. At the moment, there are some interesting-looking proposals relating to Machine Learning, and some interesting ones relating to web monitoring; I find out what I’ve been assigned by Friday (very exciting, no?).

Linux.conf.au 2010

Linux.conf.au 2010 is being held in Wellington, New Zealand. One of the things that makes LCA a truly wonderful conference is the first two days, devoted to single-day “miniconfs” on topic areas of interest to the Free and Open Source Software communities. I’m currently involved with two proposals; I’m primary proposer of a developers’ miniconf (called “Open Languages”) aimed towards uniting the developer communities of open source programming languages, and I’m secondary proposer of an education-flavoured miniconf. I’d be equally happy if either of these proposals get up, but with 30 other awesome proposals competing for 12 openings for miniconfs, there’s going to be some very stiff competition.

Blackjack?

Hey, turns out I turned 21 on Wednesday. How did I manage that?