Don't ask me about my thesis

Thanks Angie for organising the T-shirt. It's great!!

Here you can see the front. The back has all the names of senior postgrads in CSSE making up the phrase.

I like it, I like a lot, it's a good T-shirt!

Yekleng's wedding photo

YekLeng's wedding photos are up at yekleng's space.
Very nice. Go and have a look.





I'll be back to Malaysia on 24/3 to attend their wedding on 26th. And I'm honoured to be one of his "brother" team to help him in any way to win the bride on the day. I'm very excited.

Chinese version here

Eventful week

The last week was packed with events.
Badawi's visit to Perth, O-Day, AMWA BBQ and neighbour's Birthday party.

I've blogged about Badawi's meeting with student, so I'll go on to his Honourary Doctorate conferement ceremony. I went to Curtin Uni on Wednesday morning for the ceremony. It took several correspondances to get my name on the list to be admitted into the ceremony. And on the day, there are many security personnels there for the event. But surprisingly, there's no registration process to get in, so anyone could just pop in and will be able to get in...
Anyway, the ceremony was ok, the aboriginal welcome was interesting with the didgeridoo. I was surprised to find that the chancellor of Curtin Uni, Eric Tan was born in Malaysia, it made the event even more special. :)
See here for photos I took and put on AMWA website.

Friday was Orientation Day on UWA. I helped set up a stall for the long-non-publicised Table tennis club. We moved a table tennis table to James Oval where the event was and it turned out to be a very very good publicity tool. Got quite some people signed up on the day and many more showed interest. And Derong's idea of making a sticker instead of just hand out flyers turned out to be very effective as well. :)
We are in the process of getting more tables and more playing time for the club for our expansion.
It was a fun day. Haven't been involved with clubs for a long time. But we all got sun burnt. :`( It hurts.

Saturday, AMWA had a family BBQ in Kings park near by. About 60 people showed up, and many people brought a plate of great food to share. It was good. And I met quite a few people of my age as well. So it was good. Photos of the day, see here.

Then Saturday night my neighbour had a birthday party. So we went over. I was amazed by the stylishness of his garden and living room. He is a talented architect, I can tell.

My resarch work lags quite a bit this week. Will tune into work hard mode as my prime minister told me to do so.

Photo with Badawi

Thanks Thomas for giving me this group photo taken with my prime minister Badawi and other UWA students. It is an honour.
See here for previous post about this event.

News coverage:
The Star | Bernama

Face recognition stuffs

I went to a psychology seminar on the topic "Unfamiliar faces aren't faces" which talks about the diffference between familiar and unfamiliar face recognition. An interesting paper here.

I then went off to try to find out about the face grid its uses in the paper and how it come about and maybe that'll be useful to my morphing research. Then I found out about this great document on face recognition.
Report on Facial Expression Understanding by Ekman, Huang, Sejnowski and Hager.

And Wiskott has a bibliography on face recognition:
Face Recognition (Computational Models)

DICTA group photo

I am filling up the publication audit for the school and checking up the DICTA website to confirm some information. And they have put the group photos up. I might have been there for quite a while.

DICTA2005 Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications

Honorary Doctorate for Badawi

The Honourable Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Prime Minister of Malaysia, was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Technology by the Curtin University of Technology. Here's some photos on AMWA's website.

(This is a trace-back blog updated on 09/08/2006.)

Badawi is in Perth

The Consulate General of Malaysia organised a meeting between the Hon Dato Seri’ Abdullah Bin Haji Ahmad Badawi, Prime Minister of Malaysia and all Malaysian students currently pursuing tertiary education in Perth, Western Australia.
I was one of the 250 students who were there today. Badawi is in Perth to receive the honourary doctorate to be conferred to him tomorrow by Curtin University of Technology, see new release on Curtin website.

I got there at around 3:30pm, the ballroom was easy to find in the Hyatt hotel because there is a big concentration of Malaysians at the side of the main entrance. So I made my way there and put in my registration under UWA.

The seatings were dining style in a big ballroom. I happened to find an empty seat on the second row of table, with some student leaders (ISC and AMS) from Curtin. I was quite impressed with their manner the moment I joined the table and thought they must have good involvement in student organisation and it was proven to be right later when they turned out to be the office bearers. :)

The MC gave some general briefing about the flow of program, and without noticeable delay (I wasn't looking at my watch) Badawi arrived.

We sang Negaraku and a new song called "Jalur Gemilang", there was a bacaan doa (prayer), and then the PM gave his speech and took some questions/comments.

Some of the points I took down from his speech:

Students today are decision-makers tomorrow. It's the human capital that countries and companies are trying to utilise well. He stressed on the point that "first class facilities" has to be matched with "first class mentality" of the people managing it. Ya, very true, that's a serious shortcomings that Malaysia suffers and has to overcome ASAP.

He then discussed about what makes a "Man of Quality" that can serve a country/company well? Smart is not enough, it's more important to have good value, be honoest and sincere, ie have a good character. He said it in Malay which I am glad that I still understand - "Pandai tapi tipu --> lagi susah!"

He also mentioned about some plan of Malaysian government such as the emphasis on bio-technology (the wonders that oil palm produces through R&D), pharmaceutical area, and he made a point on corruption fighting struggle as well.

He ended his speech by re-emphasis a point he made at the beginning:

It's not that you're not capable, it's that you're not putting in enough work, effort, focus!
There is no easy way to success, Work hard!

There were some refreshment at the end of it, and group photo then bersurai.

It finished at 7pm. I left the hotel and headed to my car. To my astonishement, there was a ticket on my windscreen, I thought: "Not again?!". Double checking the expensive piece of paper and the road sign, revealed that it is a pay parking bay till 4:15pm, which I read in a hurry when I arrived, but I miss the top of it in red "C 4:15-6pm". After 4:15pm, it's not free parking as I thought but NO PARKING!
That makes the meeting with Badawi quite a lot more expensive.
Oh well, it was my fault to rush and not checking it throughly. Lesson learnt.

Group photo with Badawi (UWA students) click here.

House cleaning anyone?

Just yesterday and today, I got more than 30 "comments" on this blog from House cleaning company. All spams!! Now I have a filter in my gmail account that block it.

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BAD!

Check up your car regularly

One day after I got my harddisk failure resolved, my car gave me another surprise!
I went to another AMWA monthly committee meeting on Saturday. I drove to the city parked my car in the Pier Street carpark. After the long meeting which centered around new membership, this coming week BBQ in Kings park and our Prime Minister Badawi's visit to Perth, I went back to the car park and get my car at 12:30pm.

Strange thing happened - my immobilisor didn't respond. It keeps flashing and immobilise my car!! So my car cannot move. The following 1.5 hours, I was there making callssss to find people to help solve the problem. The fact that it was a Saturday really made the situation harder! And it was not easy to get a car electrician that will come out to fix it. And beore the incidence, I didn't know it's car electrician's area of expertise. Tried locksmith and it was no good and the people they refered me to was too busy for the job.

So eventually, I got a friend (Thanks a lot Lingcai!) to make some calls to locate the right person. He agreed to come by at 3pm. I was glad and I had some time to fill up my stomach. So I did that and strolled around the city and got a stereogram book from the secondhand bookshop. I was quite happy by then. :)

The rest was not adrama anymore, the car electrician came by with his son and put a new immobilisor in, messy wiring and awkward working condition in the not-very-well-lit carpark. The electrician's son looks very asian, and it turns out that his wife is Chinese, from JB, Malaysia. Ha!
It cost me $120 for the whole lot. And being in the carpark for another 3 hours after I paid at 12:30pm, I thought I might need to pay some stupid amount of parking again before I can get out. But I told the cashier guy about the incidence and he was very nice to let me go. So, I was happy again. :)

I got out of the carpark, it's 3:45pm! I went to do some quick groceries shopping and got my hair cut too. What a day!

Scientific American: One Face, One Neuron

Scientific American: One Face, One Neuron

This is cool!!

Back up your computer NOW!

My small 20GB harddisk died on Thursday morning. :`(

I heard some sound (later I found out it's called the "click of death") coming from my computer box on Wednesday afternoon. I was a hot day and I hibernated my computer straight after. That night it was still fine. But I did a shutdown that night and Thursday morning, it refused to boot.

I went to get a new harddisk with 10x capacity. WD2000JB - Western Digital 200GB HDD with 8MB cache. Got it from Netplus (again). If I went there 2 hours earlier, I might be able to get a 250GB one with only $6 more. It was "on low stock" when I first checked, but became out of stock just before I left my house. Oh well, 200GB should be plenty anyway.

So I spent quite some time getting the system back on. Now it's back to life, but I lost some data.

Not sure if I'll go for the Raid system to make two harddisk work together with redundancy to ensure minimal data lost in such case... Not sure how much effort will be required to set it up. If it's too much, I'll probably back it up regularly manually...

May your hard disk be strong.

Chat in Gmail. Cool!

Google has just included Google Talk into Gmail. I tried it, it's a good idea. One more IM to play with. But GTalk emoticon is still very primitive compare to what MSN has to offer. But here (on the left) are some cute stuffs I found. More on GTalk emoticons.

I heard news that Yahoo has exposed its users details and led to some internet journalists being jailed in China. Got the news from screenshots.

When the information leave your computer into the www, it is out there to be exposed. So although the internet site claims that they'll keep your thing private to you, if you really don't want people to see it, keep it safe on your own PC.
And all these free internet email providers have no obligation to keep your data anyway. If they want, they can just shut down Gmail and blogger or anything like that and all our precious emails and contacts, all our efforts of blogging will be gone!
So I think I shall back up all these things on a regular basis to avoid a tragic story!

Matlab tips and tricks

Matlab tips and tricks by Gabriel Peyre

Perception puzzles, Visual Perception, Optical illusions and Paradoxes

Perception puzzles, Visual Perception, Optical illusions and Paradoxes

A good collection of optical illusions. Most of them I've seen before, but there are several new ones that impressed me.

| Three Streams | Blind Spot Experiment | Color Vision Test |


I did not dare to watch the "Pikachu Hypnotic eyes" yet as it' slast at night and I don't want to faint or feel sick after watching it.

To hack or not to hack?

I'm wondering if I'm the only person in the whole world who uses anim8or to generate test images with known camera parameters and then uses MATLAB to work with the images, with those known camera parameters...

Hmm... I guess I'm not the only one as I know SQ is using it as well. (we sit back to back in the lab.)

There's some weird thing I don't understand why. The images from Anim8or have a half pixel distance difference from what is calculated from Matlab?! For example, a textured cube with 8 vertices in space, I know the vertices, I know the position and pyr of the camera, so in anim8or, I position everything as desired and render the image. No problem! When I get this image into Matlab, I calculate the image points using the vertices and camera matrix and overlay them on the image, strangely enough, the two set sof points don't exactly match. But, it matches exactly when I add 0.5 to all the image points I calculated in Matlab!

So, to have a good morph (as that's what my research is on in case you don't know), I have to have the feature points exactly on. But it'll screw up the fundamental matrix and the projective geomatry because the image point is HACKED!

Well... What should I do to get over this? The great spirit of the universe, please enlighten me!

Professor Terzopoulos won Oscar

Found it on Ramesh Jain’s Blog that Terzopoulos just won the Scientific and Technical Academy Awards! See it here and here.

I knew Terzopoulos from his work in "snakes" (energy minimisation spline) with Kass. And I came across Jain's work too through similarity measure...

It's funny to know that Jain has a blog as well. I'll be checking it out to see what this distinguised researcher usually does.

Rotation Matrix again

I'm back to doing som experiment and want to generate some random 3D points and then some random cameras that point to those points. So, I have to set the random focal length (within some range), the position of the center of image (principle point) and the rotation matrix for the camera to face the point cloud.

I forgot how to do them already, so some online readings directed me to these good sources:

Concepture overview, fully illustrated presentation:eScience Lectures Notes : Transformation in 3D

Plain text explanation with code: Matrix and Quaternion FAQ