Demonstration of Forced Perspective

I found two excellent demonstration videos of forced perspective recently. 


The first one is by Richard Wiseman . He demonstrated how to use optical illusion to make objects appear smaller or larger than they actually are. Photographers also use this trick to create context in their photos. See What makes a creative photograph for some examples.

The second one comes from Brusspup. I like the way that he showed camera zooming in before revealing the truth. Apparently, seeing is not believing.

Resources:

• Forced perspective wikipedia

• What Makes a Creative Photograph?

• Richard Wiseman

• Richard's website has a lot of interesting videos, e.g., bets you always win, that you don't want to miss!

• Richard's Youtube Channel

• Brussopup's Youtube Channel

My New Personal Website

As my original web host server netfiles.uiuc.edu is longer available, I transferred my personal webpage to www.jiabinhuang.com.

Here are a few links on my personal website that you might be interested in:

• Computer Vision Resources
• Collection of computer vision algorithm implementation, tutorials, and video lectures.
• Computer Vision Genealogy Project
• List of people in computer vision
• A Guide for Applying Graduate School in USA
• Step-by-step for graduate school application
• Course materials
• Resources I collected while taking courses in UIUC
• Slides of my recent talks
• How to come up with new research ideas?
• How to read academic papers?
• What makes a creative photograph?

The Deep Learning Saga

This is a hilarious video presented at the NIPS'2010 workshops banquet for the Deep Learning and Unsupervised Feature Learning workshop. Deep learning has drawn great attention in recent year in the machine learning community as well as other areas such as computer vision and speech recognition. This video gave a nice overview of the development in the area. 

Resources:
- Deep learning: with reading list, dataset, software
- Geoffrey Hinton: professor in University of Toronto 

Saliency Detection via Divergence Analysis

This post is a shameless self-promotion.

Two weeks a ago, I gave a talk on visual saliency detection on the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Tsukuba, Japan. This is my very first work in graduate school. In this work, we provide explicit connection among various existing bottom-up saliency detection algorithms. Therefore, through a unified perspective, one can better understand what the quantities defined in many works really mean.

Saliency Detection via Divergence Analysis: A Unified Perspective from Jia-Bin Huang

The most important qualities for success in graduate school by Prof. Bill Freeman

Bill Freeman, professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in MIT, gave a 10 min talk on the topic "The most important qualities for success in graduate school" this April. Instead of giving only his opinions, he crowd-sourced the talk from MIT Computer Science faculty and other CSAIL researchers. If you are a junior MS or PhD student, you should definitely would like to check it out!

Here is the link to the slide [PDF].

Website Collection for Nerds

If you were/are a PhD student, you will find the following websites hilarious. 

1. Research in progress: http://researchinprogress.tumblr.com/

2. The PhD Comic: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php

3. xkcd: http://xkcd.com/

4. Abstruse Goose: http://abstrusegoose.com/

Seven Falls @ Colorado Springs

終於來到了會議的最後一天，下午就要離開風景優美的Colorado Spings了，趁著早上還有幾個小時，我們四人在會場吃完早餐之後，決定前往距離市中心僅僅10分鐘左右的景點Seven Falls

進入園區後歡迎我們的，是完全不怕人的小松鼠們。

誰找我？

松鼠傻愣愣的樣子實在是太可愛了 XD

道路兩旁是聳立的岩壁

3D Computer Vision: Past, Present, and Future by Prof. Steve Seitz

This is a tutorial talk given by Prof. Steve Seitz, a professor at the University of Washington. He gave a excellent overview of the history of 3D computer vision technology. It is very interesting to see how these ideas were developed and evolve over time. (I am especially amazed by the early attempt of building a "stereo machine" back in 1957.)

The slides of this talk is also available online in his website.

How to Speak: Lecture Tips from Patrick Winston

One seminar notification from CSAIL at MIT caught my attention today. The talk title is "How to Speak?". This coming event is on 11:00 AM tomorrow at MIT. Unfortunately, I could not attend the talk in person. Therefore, I searched the internet and found a video of the previous version of the talk. Though not containing the latest materials, I found the talk pretty informative and useful. Here I share this resource with you.

Note: The video clips on YouTube were not organized such that I need to manually select the next clip in order to proceed. Thus, I made a playlist with right order. (See the video below.) Or, you could watch the whole video from the Harvard Bok Center.

Abstract

Professor Patrick Winston of MIT outlines a structure for how to give an effective lecture, illustrating the ideas by using them himself. He covers how to start a lecture, cycling in on the material, using verbal punctuation to indicate transitions, describing "near misses" that strengthen the intended concept, and asking questions. He also discusses use of the blackboard, overhead projections, props, as well as "how to stop."

How to Read Academic Papers?

Reading academic papers is one of the most important skills for doing research. Many students find difficulty in reading academic papers efficiently and effectively. During my undergrad years, I used to read papers in a very inefficient manner and often end up with wasting my time reading irrelevant or low-quality papers. However, during the past few years, I have gradually learned how to read papers in a better way. I feel that the knowledge and experience will be beneficial to junior students. Thus, I summarized my thoughts and advises from others in the following slides, presented visually.

How to Read Academic Papers 

View more presentations from Jia-Bin Huang

Other excellent resources on this topic:

• How to read a paper by S. Kesha
• How to Read a Scientific Paper by John W. Little and Roy Parker
• Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology by Michael J. Hanson
• How to read a research paper by Michael Mitzenmacher