The moment you know you are going in the right direction..

I have been working lately on a project, which has taken up a lot of time uptill now.
I admit it is really difficult to do research and I do admit that sometimes it gets you to the point of total frustration. But the reward is truly the most awesome thing.

Earlier this week, I recieved a the result of review process for the conference paper I had submitted in one of the best conference for computer vision. And to my surprise and excitment, it got accepted.

This might be the beginning but I still have a long way to go. However its good to know once in a while that what you are doing is the right direction. Certainly gets your frustration down and motivation high.

I will be posting more about the topic related to this publication. Stay tuned

The Universe is in us!

I have been away from this blog for a while, and there are a number of reasons for that. Mostly I have been really really lazy with lots of work and sleep. The good news is that I am back and I have quite a few things to post about.

While reading this, you might be wondering what this post is about? Well its about surprising similarities between two totally different worlds. The first one involves the microscopic world of DNA. The data I used is specifically cancer mutated DNA I was provided when I went to a GameJam for Cancer Research UK. One of the problems we tried to address in this gamejam was to identify the regions in DNA with cancer mutations. Being a Computer Vision Engineer, I have been really interested on representing the data in a visual way. While I might not have succeeded in creating something useful, however what I found was quite interesting.

Game hackathon for Cancer Research UK

Over the weekend I was at the google campus london for the hackathon for Cancer Research UK. The objective of this hackathon was to convert dna data into an interactive and social game to help accelerate the cancer research. The data provided by Cancer Research UK had different mutations in dna, which could be identified by sudden shift in the data points. Approximately 40 developers and gamer spent 48 hours to design different games that utilized this data, had the social gaming experience and above all provided some feedback for easy identification of the dna mutations resulting in Cancer.

The outcome was a number of games with different diverse ideas, each one focusing on one thing, to analyse the data using human eye. More details on this event coming soon, as we are all waiting to hear about it from Cancer Research UK.

Report on this event can be found here: bit.ly/WsTB1B
City University Press Release on this event: http://tinyurl.com/cmxdbyc
 

Computer Vision in Matlab

Over the time of my research I have found out that it is really difficult to get access to actual codes that different authors use in their implementation for their publication.

I just found out about a very good link where you can find basic algorithms and  implementations of different image processing techniques which can be useful for a person doing research in these field.

Here is the link ( Peter's Functions for Computer Vision ):
http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~pk/research/matlabfns/

Kudos to the University of Australia for putting this online for other researchers.

Update 07/03/2013: Since I wrote this post, I have found numerous matlab implementation pages online. I am sharing a list below.

Right now I have just listed down all the available toolboxes and codes. I will be sorting and updating this list soon.

Future of Music == Gesture + AI + Singing

While doing some research, I found this talk in which a musician talks about how she was able to use different gestures to compose a song. The actual talk can be seen below:

What is the first thing that comes to your mind after watching this? yes, it is amazing to see such a performance for a music fanatic. But for me it is even more interesting to see the different aspects of data fusion involved. By looking at her performance, there are a number of things that comes to my mind:

1. Hand gestures recognition using data gloves.
2. Body posture recognition using Kinect Sensor.
3. Localization of the person on stage using Kinect Sensor.

You might have noticed, that there are different hand gestures which are used to start the editing or instrument playing sequence. While the hand gestures are used to play specific notes as well, body posture specifies the different after effects/post processing. Similarly the location of the singer is used to relate it to different music effects.

This really shows the potential of natural interaction technology, and what might be achieved if new ideas are integrated into these natural interaction methods.

Reference:
http://www.kinecthacks.com/imogen-heap-talks-ableton-controlling-gloves/