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 great overview of the history of 3D computer vision technology. It is very interesting to see how the 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."

Computer Vision Resources

I collected a set of links of useful codes for various computer vision applications last June. However, as the list gets longer and longer, it become difficult for me to add more items/links. Also, the classification and tagging of the resources are inevitable ambiguous. For example, SIFT might be referred to feature detection or feature extraction. To handle the increasingly long list of computer vision resources and allow users for efficient searching, I adopted the SIMILE Widgets: Exhibit. It allows me to easily create interactive web pages without  complex database and server-side technologies (e.g., PHP). 

Here is the new version of the computer vision resources page. [ computer vision resources ]

If you would like to recommend or contribute the resources which are not in the list, you could submit it by filling up this form. I would then update the information to the list. 

Bugs report, comments, and suggestions are welcome!

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

Start Blogging

As one of my 2012 new year resolutions, I am starting this blog.

There are several reasons. First of all, I want to practice writing (in English). Second, I would like to have a space where I could write down some of my thoughts. Third, share some resources I found useful with others (primary research related). A personal blog seems like a perfect solution.

Welcome to my blog.

Note: I have another blog called "Redefining Open Mind". Most of the posts are written in Traditional Chinese. I might transcribe some of the posts (in English) to this blog in the future.