8 Aralık 2009 Salı

CS 344 Competiton

Team Okanagan won the third place with BEST HCI PROCESS AWARD!!
Thanks to Gordon Chang and Erik Tano!!

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/news/press/CS344HCIDesignCompetition.shtml

26 Kasım 2009 Perşembe

Almost finished

Yes! 5 months have been pasted! Incredible and amazing! If I wanted to partition these months it will be so easy:
August - Holiday
September - Introduction
October - Questioning & Regretting
November - Conceding & Hard Working
December - (Expected) More hard working ...

Now I'm writing some of the stuff that will finalize most of my works the course because there is no final exam. Nevertheless, I do have two final exams one from 505 and 344 (ehhh!) And still have to finish two projects and one assignment. I learnt a lot and explored both myself and revealed another 6 months of my future. My expectations and decisions are starting to take more shape and I'm so glad for that.

I'm flying to New York on 20th December and I have no doubt that holiday is going to be a great energy refill for me! More fun and work will be waiting for me in Vancouver. I can't believe that now I have spent the same time as in my exchange. If you'll ask me, I probably had chance to do only 25% of things this time compared to 2007. Next term I'm expecting courses to be more balanced! Will seee! I'm guessing that I won't be writing here until January.

Happy new year! Happy 2010!!

15 Kasım 2009 Pazar

16-19 Nov: menu of the week

-linguine bolognese
-banana &berry milkshake
-kurufasulye [hopefully will make some tomato pilaf]
-spaghetti with prawns
-salad

14 Kasım 2009 Cumartesi

A must-have list of a typical grad

  1. big chunk of ice cream - there should always at least one while depressed with work
  2. pack of tea or coffee - for sleepless night before deadlines
  3. pasta - for cooking during the sleepless nights again
  4. addictive tv series - there is always one although you won't need it
  5. pair of extra glasses - in case being out of lenses and throwing last one
  6. good friend outside of school - when life sucks, you don't want to see anyone from school
  7. emergency market - to buy something late night such as pack of cigarettes, coke, ice cream, coffee
  8. lots of photos of loved ones - to keep yourself sane and reminding a backup plan of going back home
  9. place to drink on friday nights - fridays are always best for drinking
  10. headache pill - you never know when you need it

will add few more if found necessary.

12 Kasım 2009 Perşembe

Ambulo: Walkabout Phase II


Our project presentation of course CPSC544 Phase II. Our presentation is also recorded. I will try to post that video as well.

11 Kasım 2009 Çarşamba

Can't control my hands

I guess I am swelled up around these days so that I can not hold myself writing on a paper or here! However this time it is somewhat different. I feel like my hands are aspiring to express something, but my mind can not control them and I can't write something meaningful.

I watched the movie 'Sweet November' on the tuesday night after cooking some meat and later two chocolate soufflés. It was an emotional movie for me and sometimes I lost myself in that perfect world. After few hours watching movie, I was still in its spell that I didn't realized it was too good to be true. I never met people like Sara who can pull you out from an augmented reality and show you what you are truly capable of. She was totally an extraordinary person but not real. She had principals, pride, strength and patience -she was also very good looking but this has got noting to do with it's reality- but ....

I was going to end this sentence but I believe I am too young to complete it. I hope I'll never be able to complete it because I do still want to believe in Sara. Life is too short to wait, and to fast grasp all.

I seriously want and need to go somewhere where no one can reach me as well as I can contact them at least for a year. I know that this will only slowdown life in my eyes and will not change anything. So why do I want to do it then ..?

Maybe I should also consider keeping this blog private?

10 Kasım 2009 Salı

Chilliwack

Rafting photos arrived at last ! This was probably 2 months back... Marine Drive Event which I initially registered Shailen and Gordon too but they got some health problems later on and missed this great trip. The water levels were pretty low but it was still a fun experience. I do still keep the clay I took from Chilliwack.

9 Kasım 2009 Pazartesi

Today and Tomorrow

reading: elBlli from Ferran Adrian, humble pie from Gordon Ramsay
listening: The Mirror Conspiracy

Green Beans
White beans - kurufasulye
Bulghur pilaf
Caponata [recepie]
------Next-----
chocolate soufflé
something with chicken
ginger bread cookie

5 Kasım 2009 Perşembe

What a year!

2009 is almost ending and it was been hell of year even now. Where did i left and where is it now?

I left Koc IUI after my graduation [13 Jun 2009] and had a amazing , wonderful graduation present. A trip to France, Barcelona and Italy. Me and Deren went to places that we had read in our ARHA 322 course, and take a little sun break at southern France which was one the best places I have ever been. During the mid of summer we came back and I started to prepare for Canada. It was interesting that some people were more exited about my going back to UBC than me! I guess it was something I wasn't 100% sure too. Anyway! I landed to Vancouver in mid August and luckly found a residence at marine drive. Went to Seattle to see my sister for weeks and come back to school.

So far, it has been really busy full 2 months. I remember sleeping in the office few days or even staying up all night at dorm. It was something I am used to do but it gets harder every time. And now I also have responsibilities to my students that I'm TA'ing. So it is important to be awake during all day. I'm still working hard(for myself), learning really interesting stuff and increasing my skills in different areas (like team work)! Overall TA'ing and invigilating exams is so much fun, classes and projects require really hard work and long working hours. Furthermore, if I also want to accomplish or add some other values on my own it gets really hard. But I believe that all this work is going to pay off and I'll remember my these hard days as something I wanted and liked to do.

During my 3 moths here I also realized that I wasn't a lonely tiger. My days with better relationships with my family , friends and Deren were effecting my whole day or even weeks. It was something that I wouldn't even believe few months ago. My emotional state wasn't also effected by friends and family but also by me. I bought my first chef knife during my second month here and started to find happiness and relaxation while cooking. I was a great way disconnecting myself from my assignments troubles and even depressions. It was something I deeply desire and wanted to learn more. While weather was shining I was going to save-on-foods to buy groceries almost couple times a week. But now its harder for me to find time for that.

I don't know why this monologue is named 'what a year' eventhough we still have two months. As an intelligent guess it might be caused by starbucks release of Christmas cups.

I still do like to drink good wine , having some nachos with interesting beer, chatting with extraordinary people about crazy ideas and our shared knowledge, cooking for myself and for people I like to know more, working (reasonable hours) and learning. UBC, Vancouver, London, Turkey is still sometimes punching me and making me smile at the same time! Life is still worth living and exploring and most of the time enjoying if you are willing to!

hope to stay connected
arrivederci
caio
hoscakal
au revoir
goodbye

12 Nisan 2009 Pazar

Up Coming Discussions

  1. Envisioning Sketch Recognition: A Local Feature Based Approach to Recognizing Informal Sketches by Micheal Oltmans PhD Theses
  2. Foundations of Transparency in Tactile Information Design by Karon E. Maclean
  3. Learning from One Example Through Shared Densities on Transforms by Erig G. Miller

8 Mart 2009 Pazar

Symbol Recognintion with Kernel Density Matching

Wan Zhang,Liu Wenyin and Kun Zhang

This paper proposes a new statistical method for symbol recognition. The proposition is similarity measurement of two symbols to satisfy various requests in symbol recognition such as scaling-invariance, etc. A symbol is represented by a 2D joint density estimated from a set of points sampled from the skeleton of the symbol. Matching two symbols is then equivalent to determining whether the two symbols have similar portability distributions. Similarity of two symbols are determined by the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence distance. However, this matching is not orientation invariant. So they propose two other methods for determining orientation of the symbol: Angle searching algorithm and independent component analysis (ICA) technique.

For extracting probability distributions Kernel Density Estimator is used (aka Parzen Window Method). And for preprocessing they applied adaptive noise reduction, vectorization of points and uniform length sample points. They also centralized the symbol for zero-mean and applied principal component analysis (PCA) in order to make the symbol representations more robust.

To solve the rotation problem they tried two methods searching and ICA. Searching algorithm was searching the orientation which resulted with least KL divergence which was very time consuming. So they proposed a second ICA method which works faster. ICA's property is that outputs don not change even if some components of the original data are multiplied by a nonzero constant, or data are rotated.

Experiments conducted of proposed method were on GREC 2003 and 2005 datasets. These datasets include rotated and noise added symbols. The results on GREC dataset are impressive and successful. This method might the be the best method for this dataset so far.

Discussion:

Proposed technique is designed to be noise invariant and become successful. However, as my focus is on sketch recognition definition of noise in this paper doesn't relates to the different drawings in sketch recognition as it is not just some random samples and points. For sketch recognition a flexible technique is required rather than noise independent.

2 Mart 2009 Pazartesi

Interaction techniques for ambiguity resolution in recognition-based interfaces

Jennifer MAnkoff, Scott E. Hudson, Gregory D. Abowd [Georgia Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University]

Summary:
Paper briefly presents a survey of existing error correction techniques in the user interface. These 'mediation' techniques most commonly fall in to one of the two strategies, repetition and choice. Paper calls them 'mediators' because they are mediate between the user and computer to specify the correct interpretation of the user's input. Mediation techniques then serve to resolve ambiguity of possible interpretations of user input, helping to determine which of those potential interpretations is the one user intended.
Paper lists programs that resolve ambiguity and says that they do not go ahead of choice or repetition techniques. So the purpose of this paper is to introduce four new mediation techniques other than choice and repetition.
1. Adding alternatives to choice mediators: Extending the basic n-best list choice mediator, by enabling users to control filtering and specify individual characters (ex: selecting only some part of an suggested word from the list), allow users to specify length (ex: user can feed mediator to indicate that users intended word is longer) and allow users to escapce (in case of totally wrong start)
2. Occlusion in choice mediators: Problem is that mediator interactions and user inputs can overlap. What paper suggest is: The mediator repositions all interactors that intersect with its suggestions so as to remove any occlusion.
3. Target Ambiguity: Target ambiguity arises when the target of the user's input is uncertain. For example selecting word by circling and it can be addressed by treating the mouse an area instead of a point. The magnified area is interactive and users can click on interactors inside it just as an unmagnified portion of the screen.
4. Errors of Omission: This error occurs when some or all of the user's inpout is not interpreted at all by the recognizer. Paper address this with guieded re-recognition. The user can re initiate re-recognition by specifiying a segment that should have been recognized. By doing so, the user is giving system an important new information.

Discussion:
Paper address problems of common recognition systems and makes a good separation of mediators from recognizers. Also each proposed mediator offer and address a problem in mediating techniques. As all recognizers are error prone, the methods described are useful while designing a recognition system. However, first method (adding alternatives) makes a more important point than others because other techniques seem to be specific for some domains, especially in Occlusion and Target Ambiguity.

Auto-completion for Diagram Editors Basedn on Graph Grammers

Steffen Mazanek,Sonja Maier, Mark Minas Universitat der Bundeswehr, Germany

Summary:
The syntax or a particular visual language can be defined by means of a graph grammar. In an usual way of diagram editors,a diagram template is chosen and then empty texts are filled accordingly. However, the purpose of this paper is not selecting pre-defined template from editor but to enable editor to auto-complete diagram according to diagrams grammar.

For a given graph H and Hyper-Edge Replacement Grammar (HRG) G, H is first parsed into hyper-edges and nodes. A completion of H with respect to G is graph H' that again belongs to language G. To form H' there could be 2 types of modifications:
1.Inserting a new edge into H,
2. Connecting nodes of H.

Auto-completion of graphs are done as follows:
1. A spatial relationship hyper-graph(SRHG) is formed by neighbourhood relations within graph.
2. Sending this information to parser. Parser connects edges and forms a new graph.
3. If user asks for assistance and indicates desired size of completion.
4. It computes all possible graph completions up to the used defined size.
5. Selected graph is send to step 1.

The graph parser used in this paper is uses dynamic-programming techniques similar to Coke, Youngger and Kasami algorithm. In order to layout the graphs an constraint satisfactory problem technique is used.

Discussion:

Although paper accomplishes its target to complete graph, their proposition is not a very smart way of doing it. While taking assistance, offering all possible graphs is not very intelligent. Also, in order to add another node to the graph, user has to specify nodes to add. I don't think that this paper is relevant to topic of auto-completion because of these reasons.