Lego Car

This is just too cool, a lego car tha runs on compressed air.

Kano kit

Something to think about...

Source: https://twitter.com/AIIsAwesome/status/404341645509812224/photo/1

Just received notice Qualcomm Toq Smartwatch is available Dec 2nd

Qualcomm Toq Smartwatch is available as of Dec 2nd for a starting cost of $349.99 (OUCHY!).

AAAI Symposium

I've been spending the weekend at the AAAI Symposium. There have been quite a few interesting talks.
John Laird gave an interesting talk on General Intelligence.
Andrew Ng also gave an interesting talk, on Deep Learning.

3D on the Web - Introduction to WebGL

This is an interesting talk offered through ACM.
Supplementary Learning Resources from Alain Chesnais
Collada:
Official website http://collada.org/
Tutorials https://collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Portal:Tutorials
WebGL:
Official website http://www.khronos.org/webgl/
Tony Parisi's Tutorials http://learningwebgl.com/
Three.js:
Official website http://threejs.org/
Ilmari Heikkinen's Tutorial http://fhtr.org/BasicsOfThreeJS/#2
X3Dom:
Official website http://www.x3dom.org/
Introductory tutorial http://x3dom.org/docs/dev/tutorial/firststeps.html

The Virtual Brain

How it works...

4D Printers

This is pretty cool, researchers are trying to add a 4th dimension to 3D printing. What they are trying to do is print material that can change over time, not just shape, but based on some external stimuli, change of behavior. I find this incredibly interesting.

The article is titled, "’4D printing’ adaptive materials" and is found on kurzweilai.net
Read the article at http://www.kurzweilai.net/4d-printing-adaptive-materials.

A great Ted talk on this same topic:

Google Glass

Our lab, ebiquity, has been playing with Google Glass. So now I am hooked and wondering what sort of app I could develop for Google Glass. I've been doing a little reading on Google glass and came across this blog. The developer, Lance Nanek developed an interesting implementation of panning using head movement.

Watch the video to learn more:


Very cool stuff.

More information for developers is here.

And yet more info for developers.

And if you want Google Glass, then keep up with the latest news.

Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning

UMBC is hosting the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning.

Register online.

The schedule is now posted.

Snapshot of the schedule:

09:00-09:45 Registration, set up

09:45-10:00 Opening

10:00-11:20 Oral presentations I

Lushan Han, Abhay Kashyap, Tim Finin, James Mayfield and Jonathan Weese (UMBC & JHU). Semantic Textual Similarity Systems

Keith Levin, Aren Jansen and Ben Van Durme (JHU). Toward Faster Audio Search Using Context-Dependent Hashing

Shawn Squire, Monica Babes-Vroman, Marie Desjardins, Ruoyuan Gao, Michael Littman, James MacGlashan and Smaranda Muresan (UMBC & Brown). Learning to Interpret Natural Language Instructions

Viet-An Nguyen, Jordan Boyd-Graber and Philip Resnik (UMCP). Lexical and Hierarchical Topic Regression

11:20-12:10 Poster session I

Posters

12:10-12:40 Lunch

12:40-1:40 Panel

"How to be a successful PhD student and and transition to a great job"
Marie desJardins (UMBC)
Mark Dredze (JHU)
Claudia Pearce (DoD)
Ian Soboroff (NIST)
Hanna Wallach (UMass)


1:50-3:10 Oral presentations II

Qingqing Cai and Alexander Yates (Temple). Large-scale Semantic Parsing via Schema Matching and Lexicon Extension

William Yang Wang and William W. Cohen (CMU). Efficient First-Order Probabilistic Logic Programming for Natural Language Inference

Xuchen Yao, Benjamin Van Durme, Chris Callison-Burch, Peter Clark (JHU & UPenn & AI2). Semi-Markov Phrase-based Monolingual Alignment

Wei Xu, Alan Ritter and Ralph Grishman (NYU). Gathering and Generating Paraphrases from Twitter with Application to Normalization

3:10-4:00 Poster session II

Posters

4:00-5:00 Breakout sessions

NLP in low resource settings, Ann Irvine (JHU)

Dynamic Programming: Theory and Practice, Alexander Rush (Columbia/MIT)

NELL: Never Ending Language Learning, Partha Pratim Talukdar (CMU)

5:00 Closing

5:15 - 7:00 Wine down

Wine and beer at Flat Tuesdays, UMBC Commons

New and Emerging Technologies in Assistive Robotics Slides

Assistive robotics from Wolfgang Heller

Baxter

Originality

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.”
--Herman Melville

Integrity

“Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

“Stars hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires: The eyes wink at the hand; yet let that be which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” ― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

ubuntu 12.04 lts - No video mode activated

After 5 hours of debugging, I finally was able to work around the issue.
In /etc/default/grub
Commented out:
GRUB_DEFAULT
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET
GRUB_TIMEOUT
Changed
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"
Get rid of the reference to "splash" because that is what is crashing.
Ref 1
Ref 2
Ref 3
Ref 4
Ref 5
I also did the following:
cd /usr/share/grub/
sudo cp *.pf2 /boot/grub
Finally I could boot but the mouse pointer was MIA.
Did this to get it back:
sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps




NOW I CAN FINALLY CATCH UP ON MY WORK!

References for graphs in R

This link provides pretty simple examples but useful. Adding error bars is not completely straightforward, this link gives a good explanation.

Data Fusion

My poster on data fusion.

How to write a good research paper and give a good research talk

Good reference for research paper and presentation advice.

Interesting Blog for Graduate Students

I found a few posts that were useful here.

IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing 2013

The IEEE ICSC.

NLP Resources

I am spending time this semester learning NLP since my work overlaps with NLP. I found a free ebook for learning NLP in Python. Another link for this book is here.
At the UMBC NLP course web site there are also slides available.
In particular, I have been working with OpenNLP which so far has been very useful. However, I am at the point of doing in-doc coref and having a lot of problems. There is not really any documentation on the in-doc coref api calls but I did find someone who dug into the code a bit and found a way to do it. However, so far, when executing my implementation, it runs forever. I hope to have an update soon.

Never Ending Learning (NELL)

Attended a very interesting talk related to Nell. The work is from Carnegie Mellon. If you are interested in machine learning, particularly how to perform learning over time, you may find this work of interest.

UMBC ebiquity group

Our group is performing interesting research by blending semantic computing with security, mobile devices, medical informatics and big data problems. Some of this research overlaps quite a bit with natural language processing. Read our publications to see the latest research coming from our lab.

Powerpoint Alternatives

I have been looking for an alternative to powerpoint that works reasonably well. So far OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not sufficient, especially when working on a team of Windows users. The following article provides a good list. I don't have a suggestion yet but would love to hear what others are using....

MASC 2013 Call For Papers Still Open

The 2013 Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is still open.

System76 Ubuntu laptops

I spent over 6 months researching laptops and finally decided to go with a System76 Ubuntu laptop. It has been just less than 1 month but I am loving my new lemur. Review to come... System76 Lemur Ultra

Bias and Variance Tradeoff

There is a great blog entry that describes this from a practical standpoint. If references the following lecture also.

How to store billions of triples...for free

So far I like, http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/bigdata/index.php?title=GettingStarted need this too: http://www.openrdf.org/doc/sesame2/users/ch07.html

LDA - Step by Step in R

Was able to get an example running very quickly with this tutorial. http://www.rtexttools.com/1/post/2011/08/getting-started-with-latent-dirichlet-allocation-using-rtexttools-topicmodels.html

Topic Modeling - Great Resource

Excellent resource! http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/topicmodeling.html

SVMs - Good Description

http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/support-vector-machines-the-linearly-separable-case-1.html

Building Templates for Basic Entity Types

http://schema.org/Person http://schema.org/Organization http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/ene/version7_1_0Beng.html

Learning Programming by means of Python

This is a very basic beginners tutorial. Good for those just learning programming. http://cscircles.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/