Simulating Watercolor
“Computer-Generated Watercolor” describes the ways in which computer science researchers managed to approximate the effects of watercolor painting. This was actually a really exciting paper to read, because it involves art and math that I actually understand (yay vector calculus!)….
Remember Me to One Who Lives There
One application of dynamic programming is finding the longest common subsequence of two strings. Greg’s example from class applied this principle to sequences of DNA, where it can indicate mutations. I thought it might be interesting to try this with…
Blackout Blob
This week, New York magazine had a series of striking aerial photographs of the city’s blackout in the aftermath of Superstorm/Hurricane Sandy. Since the blackout covers such a large area, it works well for blob detection. Principle Component Analysis (PCA)…
Local Learning Algorithms
The scientific paper, “Local Learning Algorithms,” describes a few methods of speeding up the classification process using the closest available data. “Closest” in this context refers to the proximity of data points in the input space to the item we…
Geometric Context from a Single Image
The paper “Geometric Context from a Single Image” describes a method for approximating 3D structures from the content of a single 2D image. The first part of this method involves classifying each image pixel into one of three categories: part…
Teaching my Computer to Read
I have been doing a lot of work with letters and fonts lately in Printing Code class, so I thought it might be interesting to extend some of that into my Makematics project this week. One application of machine learning…
Those Gestures are Whack
The paper, Whack Gestures, describes research into creating simple, minimally disruptive gestures for cellphones. The researchers were able to create a series of gestures based on a combination of whacks to the phone. Most smartphones have built-in accelerometers that can…
Stop and Classify the Irises
I wanted to analyze real scientific or economic/demographic data for my project this week. There is a lot of demographic data on the internet, particularly from .gov sites and the census, but it is difficult to sort through and often…
Dream Projects
Before the days of smartphones, I had always wished that there was a way to figure out the names of actors while watching a movie on TV. There was always that one character that I could not identify by name,…