Confidence in Lasso by Jared Lander

Confidence in Lasso by Jared Lander.

Learning Julia

julia is a dynamic programming language getting a bit of attention. I am running a few tutorials and learning the language. Some resources are listed below in case you are interested....

Learn about julia
Quick tutorial
Another tutorial
Google group

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.