Birthday

How time flies! I always hold such a feeling, which becomes stronger on some milestone dates, especially birthday. I think the most wonderful thing about growing older is to learn more about the world. On the other hand, the more I know, the more I will find that I don’t know and may never know. This is always true whenever I was learning about mathematics, physics and computer science. But it doesn’t matter since the knowledge of human civilization expands so quickly that we just need to be aware of the information that is really meaningful to us.

For me one of the best ways to learn is from my past mistakes and failures, such as bugs in my code, and paper rejections. Compared to the champion titles I’ve won on basketball court, the loss of a game usually taught me much more. It helps me to realize my weakness, and stimulates me to keep practicing and to become stronger.

Read Full Post »

Amateur Photographer

I’m an amateur photographer and I take pictures in my spare time. I’ve got my first photo of water drop recently, which is far from perfection due to the blurry appearance and noisy details. But I still like this picture, especially the lovely shape of the water drop and the ripple.

Both photography and computer graphics are aimed at content creation in terms of images and videos. It is interesting to notice that these two ways are complementary to each other and have their own limitations. Photography relies heavily on the device and the environment when taking pictures, while for traditional computer graphics, manual modeling is often tedius and physics-based simulation as well as photorealistic rendering are usually computationally expensive. It is thus not surprising that people are working on certain research directions trying to combine the advantages of photography and computer graphics, such as image-based rendering, image editing, texture synthesis and computational photography.

Read Full Post »

Proof in real life

I think one of the best ways to prove the usefulness of a technique is to use it in real life and produce some interesting results. Last summer, I applied example-based texture synthesis when I was designing a T-shirt for a group of football fans (including myself) who love Juventus, one of the most famous Italian football clubs. I obtained some patterns as shown below using a simple zebra-like exemplar, but some of my friends said the final results look like fingerprints. Anyway, I’m really proud of the fact that over 100 people wear the T-shirts designed by me.

Read Full Post »

Control the emotion

To work without any emotion is one of the keys to success for many professions. However, there are inevitably something that may have negative impact on our mood, like unfair review/comments, postponed schedule, or even a poor match of your favourite football team. While I’m still learning to better control my emotion, I’ve found the following tips useful for myself:

1. Lower down the (relative) importance/priority of the stuff in my mind, and think about other things that go on well. Sometimes bad emotion comes from the fact that we care about something much more than its real worth.
2. Do sports. This will distract myself naturally. In extreme weather such as the heavy snow in Beijing yesterday, an alternative way is just to imagine I’m playing basketball with full focus, which actually has been proven to be a good method to develop one’s basketball skill without too much sweat.

Read Full Post »

Traffic

The first and the most surprising impression I got in Japan is about traffic. At the crossroad without traffic light, the cars will always stop far away and let the pedestrians go first; when there is traffic light, very few people travel against the signal color.

These are totally different from what I see and experience in China. While spending extremely large amount of money on inter-city railways, the authorities have nothing to do about the traffic issue in the ever-growing large cities. The width of the road has zero impact on how fast we can go, but just determines how many cars are trapped by traffic jam per unit length.

Read Full Post »

Explanation

This week I was extremely surprised to know that even in winter they don’t have to supply heating in Sigma Building. Instead, they need to supply cold air and enhance ventilation to prevent from getting too hot. I think this is due to the following two reasons:

1. The people here are working hard. They think hard and discuss actively on working days as well as weekends.
2. The computers (especially these powerful servers) in this building are also working hard. Many of the machines are kept running all the time to deal with large amount of data and computing tasks.

Life is full of such surprising facts that eventually we will figure out the explanations.

Read Full Post »

Proposal

I gave a presentation at school this Wednesday as proposal for my PhD thesis. I was informed yesterday afternoon that I passed this qualification exam, for which the pass rate is set to be no more than 80 percent. Not a big deal, and even not worth congratulation. But overall it was an interesting process.

It is totally beyond my expectation that I spent so much time preparing for the presentation. My mentor pushed me to make several major revisions on the slides during the past two weeks. In the end he even revised the ppt file himself slide by slide. Far more important than learning some special tricks to produce slides (especially in Chinese characters), I discussed with my mentor from a rather high level about the potential research directions, the methodology to complete a PhD thesis, as well as some technical insights into texture synthesis.

Actually I had a terrible dry run in front of my mentor the day before the presentation, during which I could not even speak in Chinese fluently. But somehow I managed to control my mood during the proposal, and gave the presentation peacefully without screwing up anything.

Read Full Post »