Cuernavaca, Mexico

Last week I was invited to give a talk at a robotics events for college students in Cuernavaca, Mexico. I spoke about our work on underwater robotics, with a bit of extra emphasis on the system design part of the story, and a little bit of connectivity to robotics as a while. Since many of the students had Spanish as a first language, i used a lot of visuals and tried to speak a bit more slowly than usual (which was probably only partially successful). The students were very enthusiastic and we had an especially good question and answer session in the early evening, moderated (and translated) very effectively by Professor Jose Ruiz Ascencio.

As a bonus, I got to visit the central square of Cuernavaca and also take a short side trip to Xochicalco, which is a major archaeological site just 30 minutes outside the city. Xochicalco was both a major trading site in the 0-1200 AD time frame, as well as a significant astronomical observatory at that time.

Mexico

Mexico

Jonathan Espinoza, Greg Dudek,
and Jose Ruiz Ascencio

Xochicalco

Xochicalco Quetzalcoatl (feathered snake) pyramid

Cuernavaca

Mexico

Cuernavaca main square

  

NSERC GSC (grant selection committee)

I was part of the NSERC Computer Science Grant Selection Committee again this year. Like last year, we met in Ottawa for a week of grueling but interesting reviews of grant applications on computer science research from all over Canada. There are two CS committees (330 and 331) but they are in the process of being merged and this year I was part of the review committee for a diverse set of projects. In some cases, there were proposals from people whose work I was familiar with, but in most of those cases I was not part of the processes, and often not even allowed in the room, due to both the vagaries of the semi-random selection process combined with the stringent conflict-of-interest guidelines.

For several decades the core of the scientific granting system has been the Discovery Grant (formerly the Operating Grant) that is awarded in a per-investigator basis. Most front-line active science researchers in Canada have one of these, and the modest funding levels were determined by annually making small adjustments to the researchers previous grant. For active performers, this meant a gradually increasing funding level over the course of one's career. All in all this system worked extremely well and, despite limited amounts of funding, it provided stable effective funding for Canadian research and training. In the last decade or so, however, limitations on the amount of available research funding have prevented a few researchers from "ramping up" as fast the the organization would have liked. As a result, a drastic new process was instituted last year in several areas (despite concerns from many of the GSC members), and came this year to Computer Science.

As of this year, award levels have been largely decoupled from past funding and, in fact, the GSC members vote on scores for the grants without really knowing in advance either who will get funding, what scores assure funding, or what the final cutoff will be. That is, the GSC awards various scores, but the translation of these scores into actual dollars is only determined later. Apparently this new system produces largely acceptable results, but as a member of the GSC is was quite disconcerting to be evaluating a proposal without being able to explicitly vote that it should be funded. Also, although past performance is going to be directly coupled to funding, there is, in principle, the potential for less stability in the funding rates. This will certainly cause trepidation on the part of researchers (and could thus lead to very conservative behavior the year before a renewal is requested). All in all, I will be very interested in how well this works and what changes in funding result. I suspect some strong junior researchers may experience big increases in funding while some more senior researchers may get an unpleasant surprise.

NSERC GSC 331 members

  

EXIF.py and Zope Photo product fixes for iPhoto 08 (and 09)

The Python EXIF.py module is for extracting tags from an image. If the image has been edited with Apple's iPhoto 08 (or probably iPhoto 09 or other software) though, EXIF.py may be unable to find the EXIF tags and you might get a message like "No EXIF information found." Some people have suggested that iPhoto is stripping the EXIF data. In fact, the issue is that EXIF.py does not like it if there is other information before the EXIF segment in the file (specifically something called an APP2 segment). In short, EXIF.py only handles a subset of possible JPEG file formats. This was a particular problem for me since I use EXIF.py on my Zope web site (this one) with the Photo product to display information.

I found the problem and fixed it and also updated the Photo product as well. The modified version of EXIF.py that is able to parse these files can be found at the following link [EXIF.py]. I've also posted the fix to the maintainers, but don't know how soon they might accept it.

The basis of the problem relates to the flexibility of the JPEG/EXIF file format. A JPEG file is composed of several segments including the image, a thumbnail, and parts called APP1 and APP2. The standard EXIF.py module expected APP1 to be the first segment in the file, and didn't work if APP2 came before APP1, but this is how iPhoto creates JPEG files. The new version I have posted is smarter about interpreting the segments (although the actual code is rather ugly).

Download link:
link [EXIF.py].


Usage: python EXIF.py pic.jpg

Or, it can be used inside a python program:

import EXIF
f=open("pic.jpg")
print EXIF.process_file(f)


I have also included a substantially updated version of the wonderful Zope Photo product that was originally created by Rob Bickers (rbickers) and then updated and improved by Søren Roug [ zope.org link].

  

Solar Photos

I was talking to a colleague (Luc) recently and mentioned I had an interest in astronomy which converged to a limited extent to my former interest in photography. In this context, I thought I would share an early attempt at capturing solar flares. There were taken using a small hand-held camera.

These photos don't compare well with the serious pictures from a big telescope, or (of course) from a solar observation satellite like SOHO, but I was pretty happy with them as personal successes. Better yet, I wasn't even blinded in the effort. This was, incidentally, a quiet day on the sun but I took the pictures then because the local viewing conditions were acceptable.

Click on any image to see a bigger version.

Solar Flares

  

CS Games 2009

A team of undergraduates from McGill university made second place at the CS Games competition last weekend at Université de Montréal. The team from Université de Montréal itself won top honors. This is an annual competition that addresses many areas of computer science. The competition this year involved 27 teams from over 20 different Canadian and US universities, and spanned several different topics.

McGill won the Operations Research competition and the Optimization competition and was also awarded the best team participation award (Team spirit). In addition, the McGill team also finished in the top 3 of the Debugging, Math and Logic, Scripting, Software Engineering and Theory of Computation/Algorithms competitions.

  

IBM eats SUN? International Business Microsystems?

Rumors today are that something is happening between IBM and SUN Microsystems. Is IBM buying SUN? That would make a lot of sense since they have a lot of commonalities, SUN is in a bad spot, SUN has a lot of great technology, and the stock was low.

SUN's problem, for years, has been how to take advantage of all the neat technologies and bright people they have. Java has been a huge factor and success, but it's not clear how much it really helped them succeed as a company.

All our robotics and web work is based on technologies that are neither Sun nor IBM, but that's a bit of a shame.

  

Venus and the Moon, a photo of the month

I snapped this photo on the Moon with Venus beside it on New Year's Day up North on Montreal. This was a pretty cold day and thus the sky was nice and clear, and the near-conjunction of Venus and the Moon this year was striking.

  

Biological (sheep-based) display

This short video clip shows a biomorphic display. It's pretty cool.