Inverse Problems book @ Springer from IPRJ/UERJ

The director of my insitute IPRJ/UERJ, Francisco Duarte Moura Neto (Ph.D. in Mathematics from Berkeley), has just published  a new book at Springer entitled "An Introduction to Inverse Problems with Applications", with prof. Antonio Jose da Silva Neto (Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University). Both are very bright researchers in the field of applied mathematics and engineering with which I have constant collaboration at the polytechnic institute.

I am very glad to be working with them, and to have helped with the book. You should really go and get the book, of which we're all really proud!

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http://books.google.com/books?id=Oc8_N1PmYnYC&dq=an+introduction+inverse+problems&source=gbs_navlinks_s

5 bolsas do Google Summer of Code dadas ao IPRJ da UERJ

Cinco alunos ligados ao Instituto Politécnico da UERJ (IPRJ) acabam de ser selecionados pelo programa Google Summer of Code para trabalhar no desenvolvimento de melhorias para o Scilab, um importante software livre utilizado na indústria e academia.

Trata-se de uma conquista inédita da UERJ e da computação brasileira. "Nossos alunos realmente mereceram, mas ninguém esperava tantos aprovados de uma só vez. Captamos quase 50% das vagas destinadas ao Scilab, um resultado da competência e dedicação dos nossos alunos. Acredito ser uma vitória única e muito importante para o Brasil, que possui grande demanda de mão de obra qualificada em programação" - Diz prof. Ricardo Fabbri, Ph.D., professor adjunto do IPRJ, ex-funcionário do Google e um dos mentores oficiais do Scilab no Google Summer of Code. Dentre os alunos selecionados pelo Scilab estão Gustavo Libotte, Marcos Cardinot, e os irmãos Pedro Arthur e Caio Lucas dos Santos Souza, todos do 5o. período do curso de Engenharia de Computação do IPRJ, campus regional da UERJ em Nova Friburgo. Quatro desses alunos irão receber a quantia de $5015,00 dólares do Google durante 3 meses e todos irão realizar o desenvolvimento de software no laboratório de visualização do IPRJ, sem precisar deixar o país. O IPRJ também foi especialmente contemplado com o financiamento de um quinto aluno no Google Summer of Code, o indiano Pallan Madhavan, estudante de matemática aplicada. Madhavan desenvolverá melhorias voltadas ao pacote SIP de processamento de imagens do Scilab, de autoria do prof. Fabbri.

O Summer of Code é um programa promovido anualmente pelo Google, onde a empresa financia entidades e estudantes universitários do mundo todo no desenvolvimento de software de código aberto. O Google primeiro divulga a lista de entidades aprovadas, as quais então ajudam na seleção dos alunos a serem contemplados com financiamento. Em 2012, 180 entidades foram contempladas de um total de 406 propostas, e 1210 estudantes foram selecionados em todo o mundo, de um total de quase 7 mil pedidos -- são mais de 10 milhões de dólares destinados a software livre. A ideia da iniciativa é gerar recursos humanos altamente qualificados e desenvolver códigos reutilizaveis que o Google julga serem chave para o progresso da ciência e tecnologia. "Trata-se de um verdadeiro presente do Google à comunidade", comenta o professor.

O Scilab é um software livre para a programação de soluções científicas e de engenharia, amplamente utilizado na UERJ e em outras universidades e empresas como alternativa de qualidade ao caríssimo Matlab. O modelo de software livre tem apresentado bastante sucesso, comprovado por grandes nomes como o navegador Mozilla Firefox, o LibreOffice (substituição oficial do Estado do Rio de Janeiro ao Microsoft Office), o sistema operacional Linux e o próprio Scilab. O acesso ao código apresenta vantagens importantes ao meio científico e de alta tecnologia em relação ao modelo fechado do Matlab, pois qualquer um pode explorar o código e mesmo ser pago para realizar mudanças, como está ocorrendo no Google Summer of Code.

Segundo o prof. Fabbri, o grupo brasileiro de programadores conhecido como LabMacambira.sf.net teve um papel chave nessas conquistas. "O ambiente colaborativo do Lab Macambira foi que originou todo esse nosso esforço, tanto que outros alunos e mentores brasileiros desse coletivo também foram aceitos no Google Summer of Code em entidades como a Mozilla e E-Cidadania -- uma sequência de conquistas que traz muita visibilidade e tecnologia ao Brasil", diz o professor do IPRJ. Os alunos, motivados pelo êxito alcançado, pretendem iniciar um grupo de programadores do IPRJ nos moldes do LabMacambira.sf.net. Com isso, pretendem complementar o curso com atividades práticas extra-curriculares além do Google Summer of Code.

Para saber mais sobre o Google Summer of Code, confira o site oficial

http://code.google.com/soc/

Confira tambem a lista completa dos estudantes aprovados, resumos e estatisticas:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2012


Veja o conteúdo das propostas aprovadas do IPRJ:

- Marcos Cardinot:http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/cardinot/1
- Gustavo Libotte: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/gustavolibotte/1
- Caio Souza: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/caioc2/1
- Pedro Souza:http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/grandao/1
- Pallan Madhavan: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/mady902/8001

Veja o conteúdo das demais propostas do LabMacambira.sf.net:

Aceitos:

- Vilson Vieira (Mozilla): http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/automata1

Demais propostas enviadas e que permaneceram ativas:

- Renato Fabbri (Pidgin): http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/fabbri/1
- Daniel Penalva (Scilab): http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/haaksync/1

Scilab:

http://www.scilab.org

SIP

http://siptoolbox.sf.net

Linuerj - grupo de Linux da UERJ
http://www.linuerj.uerj.br/doku.php

Lab Macambira

http://labmacambira.sf.net

My made-up zen story

I spent about a decade meditating inside a cave, against a wall. Other people were waiting for me. I left them almost burried in the cold of the snow. Now I rise and walk. Threading lightly, steadily. With other people, I will entertain and enjoy. I will practice more martial arts. I hope true enlightenment will be reached through everyone, together, performing the true hacking of modern thinking machines. With these hopes I start a new stage in life.

Ignoring Mortality We Worship Mediocrity (replay)

I am reposting one of the deepest posts in this blog (http://maverickranter.blogspot.com/2009/01/ignoring-mortality-we-worship.html): This speech from Steve Jobs is a good inspiration for us to gain courage to be innovative and bold In the same vein, I dedicate this song to Steve: Bad Religion - In so Many Ways

The new Computer Vision book

If you'd like to get a broad view of what I work with, take a look at the latest book, launched in November 2010, that represents the state-of-the-art, "Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications", by Richard Szeliski. The digital version of this book is freely available as a PDF at the author's website http://szeliski.org/Book. And the cover reflects 3D reconstruction algorithms that I've been trying to extend through the use of curve and surface differential geometry!

Brown University has gone Google

Brown switched to Google apps. I mean, the entire Brown University switched to Google (students, professors, and remaining staff): http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/brown-university-has-gone-google.html

CVPR 2010 paper accepted

Hi, my paper was accepted for the IEEE Conference in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. It is one of the major 3 conferences in my field. My paper is entitled "3D Curve Sketch: Flexible Curve-Based Stereo Reconstruction and Calibration".

Google's definition of 'Open'

Interesting article at google about the meaning of Open here.

Google Image Swirl

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/explore-images-with-google-image-swirl.html

Fixing EPS bounding box automatically

Writing a paper. Time to put Matlab or Scilab plots in. You go file->
save as EPS to include into Latex.
Surprise: Matlab has an awful bounding box space around the figure.
You want to autocrop it but its a vector graphics format,
so you can't use mogrify -trim +repage <filename> as you would normally
do with an image.

Solution: epstool. It does an autocrop for the EPS file:

epstool --copy --bbox input.eps output.eps

and your final plot will still look crisp.

Another option: save as PDF in matlab. Then use ImageMagick's convert to convert it to eps:

convert file.pdf file.eps

this will keep the vector graphics intact (at least in recent versions of ImageMagick).

Of course, you can always use pdflatex instead and avoid EPS altogether.

Oympics and World cup in Brazil

The 2016 olympic games will be at Rio! Also, the 2014 world cup will be in Curitiba, Brazil:

Website back up

My website is back after I took my server out of the lab.
www.lems.brown.edu/~rfabbri
or, during daytime, you can check:
cortex.homelinux.org

Applets - the geometry of 2 and 3 views

These are insightful applets to introduce the concept of epipolar
geometry of two and three views.

http://www.ai.sri.com/~luong/research/Meta3DViewer/EpipolarGeo.html

When you press any key, you can drag the 3D point around and sense how
the geometry changes.

More action in twitter

http://twitter.com/rfabbri
Because the iphone interfaces to twitter rock. And "twittering" to blogger using gmail — like I'm doing right now — just doesn't sound as cool.

RISD GRADUATE THESIS EXHIBITION 2009

2 colors are enough

I posted another video like this a while ago, but I always get amazed at them. I can't help but think how shape and boundaries are enough for vision. I'd like to write up what's the role of the contrast sign in producing these effects. For one, the shadows being black helps a lot. The black traces the robots leave on the street make it look like it is covered in snow. Here is a simple inversion of the video (no sound so you can play them together without interference): Shadows become highlights, and the ground seems to be covered in water instead of snow. It would be cool to have another version of the vid with only the boundaries between the black & white regions.

Google Similar Image Search

This new cool feature allow you to search for images similar to a given image. Let's say you want to search for "apple" - how to search only for the Apple, Inc, not the fruit?

http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/

Hispanic Immigration & Graphic Design

Here's my wife's newly designed thesis website: www.from-both-sides.org/home

I passed prelims!

...and I am now officially back to answering emails.

Video screen shots in Linux

I recently had to do a video of a rotating 3D reconstruction.

The simplest thing that worked out of the box was a utility called recordMyDesktop:

http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net

Easy to install & use, at least in Gentoo. The way I used it was simple:

recordmydesktop -x X_pos -y Y_pos -width WIDTH -height HEIGHT -o foo.ogv

play it with

mplayer foo.ogv

Mplayer/Mencoder can also be used to convert it to any other video format if you want, e.g. to AVI:

mencoder -idx input.ogv -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -oac mp3lame -o output.avi

I also need to generate an animated GIF. Here's how:

mplayer input.ogv -vo gif89a:output=output.gif:fps=5 -vf crop=850:562:17:99 -frames 999

If you use the input from the OGV file (not AVI), the quality will likely be better.

You can nonlinearly edit the video by opening the GIF in GIMP and deleting the frames you don't want as layers, then saving it. If you want to alter the speed, make sure you set this during the export and make sure you check the box that tells GIMP to override the default frame delays. You can also use GIMP to crop your video further.

To play your GIF animation, just open it in firefox or any browser.