It has been a long while since I posted to Echo Generation. Too long. But why? I was too busy with the previous school term, and than with holiday festivities. But now that I am back on campus and into school mode I have started to blog again as well. In the meantime, with only occasional blog reading taking place, I now have about 14000 unread posts in Bloglines! Time to do some more culling.

This term should be quite enjoyable. I am taking a number of interesting courses, including two 4th year CompSci courses. CS 480 - Information Systems Management is right up my alley, covering many of the topics under my personal research umbrella. CS 498 Image and Vision Computing seems even more cool. So much of what we have covered in the first few lectures is actually making sense to me primarily due to my experience with audio and synthesizers. Low-pass filters, sampling rates, Fourier transforms, and so on, are topics I already know about from on my on going quest to learn as much as I can about audio/sound/music.

I have been quietly building a lot of posts lately, gathering more information for each post before I make it. I figure that my previous posts show a lot about what I am interested in already. In future posts, I will try to add more value to the blogosphere by combining more sources, over more time, with more of my personal comments added. I would like to focus more on emerging synergies from different personal, academic, and business niches — with less posts about a single cool idea. More perspectives = better information.

No blog posts (or even blog reading!) for the last while, because I am completely flooded with assignments right now. The CS 454 (Dist’d Systems) assignment I am working on right now, building a working RPC system, it taking forever. And mostly because the assignment specifications, while detailed, have left more questions than answers in some areas. Thus, I have been implementing it fairly slowly, piece by piece. At least they gave the entire class an 8 day extension… but I am guessing that is because the specs are so vague. I think this is the first time in my CS career at UW that a class was given a huge multi-day extension.

I have not even started my graphics assignment which is due Tuesday. And it is the creation of a ray tracer! That is also going to take forever. I am guess the blog posting will be slow for a while longer. In the meantime, here are some cool graphics related stories I had noted a few days (probably weeks) ago.

CMU scientist honoured for novel method of using computers to simulate collisions of objects

Dr. Doug L. James, assistant professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed new methods to make computers simulate collisions a thousand times faster than previous methods.

In a computer, the shape of an object is typically represented by tens of thousands of tiny triangles. In conventional programs, when an object collides with something, the shape of each triangle is recomputed, based on physical principles.

“In most cases, things don’t touch each other all over their surfaces,” he explained. So, using what he calls “bounded deformation trees,” the computer does detailed computations only for those triangles that are touching. That reduces the amount of computing drastically and thus speeds up the entire process.

SwiftShader Software Renderer

TransGaming’s SwiftShader technology provides the world’s fastest pure software 3D renderer with DirectX 9.0 class features, according to the company, including support for Pixel and Vertex Shaders. SwiftShader is built to provide the same APIs that developers are already using for their games and applications. This makes it possible to directly integrate SwiftShader into applications without any changes to source code. Direct3D 8 and Direct3D 9 compatible APIs are available immediately.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Technology

HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is a lighting process that’s been designed to emulate in-game or artificially generated lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world.

In simpler terms, HDR allows you to make the objects brighter by allowing them to use the full brightness capabilities of the monitor and not just the brightness level at which they have been shot with (or rendered with) in the scene.

The UW DJ club is hosting a charity party in the Student Life Centre (SLC) on campus at UW. I will be playing a live breaks/DnB set from 2:30PM-4:00PM. I am quite excited. I have never played on campus before, nor with the UW DJ club. It should be quite fun. I will probably be hanging out in the SLC with my gear in case anyone wants to play, learn, or teach. Just look for a guy with a small midi controller keyboard.

I am guessing most of the other DJs will be playing some popular records with the tables, but I am just going to freestyle it with my laptop and midi controller for an hour and a half. As long as I can keep some beats and breaks going down the without overloading my computer with crazy effect chains I should be good. This will be my second live performance. At an hour and a half long, I just hope I can find enough cool material to draw from to play it out smoothly.

Here is the DJ lineup for today’s FSA Charity Event:

11:30am -1:00pm DJ Tin Lok (Andrew)
1:00pm - 2:30pm DJ Colin Bell (Colin)
2:30pm - 4:00pm The Inner Space Cowboy (Jason)
4:00pm - 5:30pm DJ Laika (Hunter)
5:30pm - 7:00pm DJ soulpepper (Jen)
7:00pm - 8:30pm DJ Adrian (Adrian)
8:30pm - 10:00pm MixMasterAlan (Alan)
10:00pm - 11:30pm DJ Karts (Kartik)

Why I blog this? It is a charity event, so if you are around the Waterloo area today please come out and show your support. As well, please spread the word of this charity event to your friends. All proceeds from this charity goes toward the Hurricane Katrina victims. Oh, and do not forget to go to the Bomber afterwards! And remember, I am playing a live set from 2:30PM to 4:00PM! Come dance!

As many of my readers may know, I am a 4th year computer science student at the University of Waterloo. My sixth co-op work term began on Monday. I am filling a software development role with corporate blogging software leaders, iUpload.

It feels great to be working with a team of dedicated, knowledgeable and entrepreneurial peers who each understand the true value of blogs. The CEO blogs, as does the company. And, all of the team m e m b e r s blog.

My bias towards iUpload in future posts should be pretty obvious.

Echo Generation will continue to grow and evolve, but I have also launched a second blog using iUpload’s Personal Publisher software. The new blog will primarily cover blogging topics.

Stay tuned :)

Always nice to see my school placing extremely well at the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition. Forth place this year compared with sixth the previous year. Great showing fellow UW math students!

Math contests sound really boring, but I would guess they are actually fairly fun for those involved. I used to write a lot of computer programming competitions in high school, and believe it or not, they were a blast.

You basically had to solve a few problems, with a team, in a short period time. You competed directly against other teams, and scores were calculated and published in real-time throughout the event. It was actually quite a lot of fun, because it is not often that one can be challenged so directly in an intellectual sense. The joy from the competitions my team won those years ago will stay with me forever.

Of course, I could still participate in similar competitions if I had the time. Topcoder is a great way to test ones skills online.

via UW Newsrelease - UW places fourth in Putnam Math Competition

How much can we understand about human motion using only simple cues? Take a look for yourself using BioMotionLab1.6, a flash-based visual demonstration developed by an international team of researchers headed by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Troje. Adjust four different sliders (male/female, heavy/light, nervous/relaxed, and happy/sad) to change the motion of the dots. It is amazing how much the human mind can ‘read’ from the motion, even though only minimal data is presented. I played around with it for a few minutes and found their simulation to be a fairly elegant examination of human movement using such a small number of points.

Dr. Troje holds a Canadian Research Chair in Vision and Behavioural Sciences. The Biomotion lab operates out of two locations: Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany.

From the Biomotion lab site:

We are working on several aspects of visual perception and cognition. Our major interest is focused on questions concerning the biology and psychology of social recognition. That is: conspecific recognition, gender recognition, individual recognition, recognition of an agent’s actions, intentions, and emotions and personality traits.

In the past, we had mainly worked on the psychophysics and modelling of human face recognition. More recently, our focus shifted towards perception of biological motion as a major source of social information.

The goal of our current work is to provide a solid basis for the description, analysis and synthesis of animate motion patterns. We want to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the information transmitted through biological motion, its perception and underlying neuronal mechanisms. In addition to human psychophysics, we are using the pigeon as a model for ethological and neurophysiological investigations in the context of courtship behaviour, social learning, and social fascilitation.

The procedure they used to create the display will be described in detail in a forthcoming paper submitted to the Journal of Vision. Troje, N. F. (submitted) Decomposing biological motion: A framework for the analysis and synthesis of human gait patterns.

Why I blog this? I referenced it in my Cybernetics and Society (STV205) class, but was unable to actually demonstrate the visualization because I did not have a computer available at the time. To anyone from class who was interested - Enjoy :)