The most memorable conference talks I’ve ever heard were given by John Krumm. John is a researcher at Microsoft Research, and he works on measuring the location of people and utilizing this information in a way beneficial to people. There are multiple things that make his talks great, but one thing that certainly makes them …
Monthly Archive: January 2008
Jan
30
Multimodal Binding Capacity in Working Memory
Today, Jan 29, 2008, I was a participant in a psychology experiment which is trying to understand working memory. The experiment consisted of me sitting in front of a computer screen with head phones while different images with sounds appeared. Then one of the images and sounds would appear again and my jobs determine if …
Jan
29
A connection between skiing and programming
While skiing with my friends (Zeljko and Andras), I’ve made a statement: “Skiing is an investment for me! Lessons that improve my skiing can be transfered to other areas, for example, programming…”. Surprisingly, my friends were paying close attention to my words and immidietly requested a support for my statements (let’s not point finger at …
Jan
29
Speech Signal Processing course – links
Last week I started teaching a Speech Signal Processing course. This promises to be a fun course for me, since it mixes DSP and human speech production, both topics I’m very interested in. I keep track of links relevant to this course here. The latest link I’ve added to this list is a link to …
Jan
27
The coming privacy threat from RFIDs
An excellent AP article by Todd Lewan discusses how RFID technology can be used to spam the living lights out of you, as well as how to track you and in general violate your privacy. While I believe RFID technology is extremely useful, it must be regulated in order to avoid abuses. We cannot simply …
Jan
25
Fun vs. hard work in education
Here’s a great article on how computer science education is being damaged by catering to students who value fun over hard work. Note the publication where this appeared: the STSS is a US Air Force organization. Why would the USAF care? Because poor CS education will have an effect on US national security, since we won’t have the manpower …
Jan
16
Time synchronization on LAN
Between our new eye tracker and not so new dirving simulator the total number of computers that we use during our experiments goes to 8. We are analyzing data logs from at least 3 different computers. So here we go: Situation: There are three computers connected to a local network, let’s call them m1, p1, …
Jan
07
The Eye-Tracker Has Arrived
Last week we received our newest research tool, a state-of-the-art eye-tracker, called faceLAB, product of Seeing Machines Inc. It uses a pair of stereo cameras to track the direction of the subject’s gaze. Not only the eyes are tracked, but head position and orientation too. Based on the collected data, it calculates fatigue measures (for …
Jan
03
A Visit to Northeastern University
On the last day of the past semester (12.21.07), Alex Shyrokov and I paid a visit to Northeastern University’s Intelligent Human-Machine Systems Lab. This was a follow-up meeting to the contact we established with fellow researchers last fall on the NECHFES Student Conference. We were very interested in finding out about the sensored SmartWheel that …
Jan
03
Technology enables Big Brother
Here is an unnerving article about a report by Privacy International detailing the lack of privacy protection around the world, including here in the US (yeah, we didn’t rank very highly). PI also runs the Big Brother Awards. Check out this year’s winners in the Netherlands. Andrew Kun