a programming semester

Next semester is a semester, full of programming courses. Distributed Systems (Erlang), E-Commerce project (J2EE and Django), Software architecture with Java (J2EE), Operating Systems (C and Linux kernel's manipulation) and a project on Distributed Information Systems (CORBA,REST,RMI ).
Honestly, this is the first time in my life that I have such an exciting semester. Let's face the real-world applications with academic approach . What are they supposed to teach that a typical-wanna be  hacker doesn't know ??

My presentation on DMMS

Here is my presentation on distributed Multimedia systems . I didn't mention the references in my slides. So, if you need them please let me know :)

my LinkedIn and Twitter account

I added my LinkedIn and Twitter account to the right side of the blog . I use these services a lot , so you can be connected with me more within this way ...

my sight into CS world was worng ?

I didn't blog recently . The main reason was due to the context switching from doing pure CS foundation to more real-world-based applications . If some of the best criteria (based on Joel Spolsky's essay ) for being highly productive programmer (i.e. hacker in my term) are to be  :

1. Being Smart
2. Get things done.

I definitely did wrong at the second part , and I don't like it .

Something should change , not in word but in action ; Those changes has already begun  ...

What Uppsala taught me

The first year at Uppsala University has finished, and like always, I started to think what was the gain of this year .
I think the most important aspect of studying in Uppsala was that they taught me HOW TO PROGRAM MATHEMATICALLY !! This is not a simple matter , specially to a student who had Electrical Engineering background and not Computer Science . Of course, they didn't teach me step by step on how to do it, but they provide some proper infrastructure to achieve this goal .
Unfortunately , I learned it a bit late (mid of May was the "Aha" moment to understand the whole concept ), but when I look back , I'm satisfied with my progress . Besides of some difficulties that this major (Scientific Computing) has , it is very worthwhile for people who want to mix their science/engineering capabilities with high-level mathematical programming . I don't know how I wanted to learn these stuff if I didn't pursue this major , but I know that it changed my perceptive to science itself.  For instance , I always wondered how I can implement a very long formula which expresses a physical rule ! Now , I not only know how to do that , but I can observe the most computationally consuming parts that affect the whole relation .
If you are interested in these stuff , I can explain it in future posts ...

Artificial Life

YES !!
At last , Craig Venter and his team made it after 10 years .
I am so so excited , I even can not type these words ! Craig had a lecture in my university (Uppsala Uni.) this winter and gave a long lecture about their discoveries .
WOW ... this is amazing ; What other things creationists need to believe in evolution ??
I love science , I do love it  . It moves humbly without any exaggeration ...  

Knowledge and Simplicity

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein

The Most important thing , I've learned here is to simplify stuff as much as you can "understand" every single detail of it . That's it , no more ....

My conclusion is so close to what Albert Einstein has told before !! But I didn't understand it till I figured out a concept in "Reinforcement Learning" during "Machine Learning" course . I'm used to give up or neglect very tricky and hard problems before , but for the first time in my life (yes,it's sad) , I decided to change my mind.
And guess what ?? By only spending one hour on one page , the result was awesome and I did understand the whole chapter afterwards .

The moral result : NOTHING is hard ; Some stuff just need more focus and dedication ...

That's it friends :)

Fuzzy image Dilation and Erosion

One of the generic approaches to fuzzy Morphology is the Fuzzy Dilation and Fuzzy Erosion . Based on an trouble that I faced with during the Fuzzy image Analysis course , I decided to publish the Matlab code , based on the paper by "Bloch and Maitre" on "Fuzzy mathematical morphologies: A comparative study" . This is just the implementation of Definition 1 (page 1344 ). Needless to say that next definition are the same to Def 1 . Just play with the parameters :)

Here is the code :

%{
        Fuzzy Dilation and Erosion
        
        Copyright 2010 Vahid Rafiei .        
        This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
        it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
        the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
        (at your option) any later version.
        
        This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
        but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
        MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
        GNU General Public License for more details.
        
        You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
        along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
        Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston,
        MA 02110-1301, USA.
%}


% Settings
len=512;
useNoise=0;
strel=1;

%% Define v
if strel==1
x=linspace(-10,10,len);
v=2-(x).^2;
v(v<0)=0;
end

v=v/max(v);
plot(v,'--');


%% define mu
x=linspace(-4,4,len);
mu=3-x.^4+4*x.^2;
mu(mu<0)=0;
mu=mu/max(mu);
if(useNoise)
    mu=mu+0.1*(rand(size(mu))-0.5);
end

hold on
plot(mu,'-','Color','red')


legend({'V','mu'})

% mu and v is ready

%% Definition 1

% Dilation

nalpha=10;
alph=linspace(0.0001,1,nalpha);
deltaAlpha=1/nalpha;

Dmu=zeros(size(mu));

tic
for a = alph
   valpha=v>=a;     
  for x=1:numel(mu)    
      mask=zeros(size(mu));
      mask(x)=1;
      mask=convn(mask,valpha,'same');
      Dmu(x)=Dmu(x)+max(mask.*mu)*deltaAlpha;      
  end  
end
toc

figure(2)
plot(mu,'Color', 'red');
hold on
plot(Dmu,'Color','blue');
legend({'\mu','D\mu'})
title('Dilation (Def. 1)');

% Erosion
Emu=zeros(size(mu));

tic
for a = alph
   valpha=v>=a;     
  for x=1:numel(mu)    
      mask=zeros(size(mu));
      mask(x)=1;
      mask=convn(mask,valpha,'same');
      mask(mask==0)=NaN;
      Emu(x)=Emu(x)+min(mask.*mu)*deltaAlpha;   
  end  
end
toc

figure(3)
plot(mu,'Color', 'red');
hold on
plot(Emu,'Color','blue');
legend({'\mu','E\mu'})
title('Erosion (Def. 1)');

Cheers ,

Meditate in Science

After years of thinking about what's exactly the difference between super succeed persons (Science in my concern) and ordinary people , I've come up with this :
"You have to Meditate in Science .... There is no other way".
The set point was an article in Newyork Times ; This article is about the importance of Practise and hard working which is not new of course . The difference starts by this sentence :

Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

 This is exactly what I want to talk about : 10,000 hours ! If you spend 3 hours a day on an specific work , it takes about 10 years and if you devote more ,say 6 hours per day , it takes 5 years to be master in your stuff .

This kind of devotion needs a self-disciplined mind and a powerful motivation , and that's why I say you have to meditate in science . In meditation you almost cut your communications with around world and just concentrate on your breath, for example . But if you extend this mindset to your specific interest (any interest , from music to science ,etc.) and start to meditate on it , you'll get there so sooner as you imagine .
Again , it needs hard self-discipline, but as soon as you start it, you will get used to it little by little . Inertia occurs when you want to start something, but after that stage, another inertia needs to stop you ; and in your situation you don't need second type of it anymore :)

Good luck on your journey ...

New mapping technology from Microsoft.

This is what that changed my viewpoint to Microsoft Research for ever !!
This fantastic brand-new technology from Microsoft is exactly what I though about in Visualization course . I wanted to mix the same idea with Google Map , but I didn't know how to start :)
Anyway , Microsoft implemented it comprehensively , and I'm really excited about it . This is a glamorous technology that delighted me deeply .

Well done :)

Where is the privacy Google BUZZ ?

Lately , the Google company have presented their new brand product , Google Buzz . Though, it seems that Buzz is an interesting technology , the level of privacy is awful ! As soon as I award this problem, I turned it off . Mail address is a key in privacy and personal stuff and Google should think about it more conservative . I Hope they fix this problem soon ....

Update 1: This is the first attempt of Google to fix the problem .

So long till now

OOPS ! It seems that I'm not an active blogger anymore !! I think it's because of social networks like Facebook and Twitter . They are really addictive .

Not really important .... I'll be active more by the end of February and the nature of posts tends to be more technical and less personal . 

TODO list for 2010

For coming year, I want to do some interesting works and I publish them here to reinforce my motivation !

1- I've decided to open source some of my projects . I'll do it little-by-little . I think they are 7-8 projects . I want to actively contribute to open source world. I don't want to shame when I face the sentence "Speak is chip, Show me the code " anymore !!

2- I've decided to switch to "Front-End" world (mostly JavaScript) for fun , beside of my main area of interest (Computer Vision).

3- This year is a so critical year or me . Lots of works are waiting to get done. Fortunately , I've become more self-disciplined nowadays, and this rises my expectations ....



** Any suggestion guys ??