ASCIIMath creating images

Friday, December 23, 2011

ICASSP 2012 paper(s)

View of the Kyoto Tower, image from
Wikipedia, by Bernard Gagnon
Well, the ICASSP 2012 reviews came in yesterday.  For me, there were mixed results: one paper accepted and one paper rejected.  The paper that got rejected I was really hoping for because it's my own idea and thus I would HAVE to present it (along with a brief vacation in Japan, of course!) while the other is a collaboration with a (now former) colleague, Mahmood Movassagh.  Hopefully we can both go to the conference, but we'll still have to fight it out who gets to present it. ;-)

The accepted paper is "JOINT ENTROPY-SCALABLE CODING OF AUDIO SIGNALS" by Mahmood Movassagh, Joachim Thiemann and Peter Kabal, an examination of a Huffman-coding like bit allocation that allows for scalable transmission and decoding. A key part is the joining of adjacent quantization regions which I talked about a bit in a previous post.

The rejected paper is on tonal perception applied to singing voice detection.  One positive note is that ICASSP reviews in general are very thorough and useful for making improvements.  I will continue working on the idea; perhaps ICASSP wasn't the best venue for that work anyways.  I'm now looking at ISMIR as a better place to submit the revised paper to.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

LASERS!

Playing with Arduino and Lasers. This is part of a SUPER SECRET!! research project with Philip Roche of the McGill Photonics Lab.
Running at low power for alignment...
FULL POWER! FOR GREAT JUSTICE!
More on this as it develops...

Thursday, December 8, 2011

A view on the first year of my blog

It's now one year since I've started this blog.  I haven't done as much blogging as I set out to do, but that was to be expected; overall there are now 27 posts (28 if you count this one), 19 of which have actual technical content.  I consider this actually pretty good, for my standards.  The trick of course is to make next year better!  I'll have to juggle that with my new life in Rennes, but it's a challenge I can rise up to!

Popularity-wise this blog has not done too badly either.  Blogger reports about 1864 hits to date; the most popular article being about my Amiga 1000 mod - though if taken together, the SIDschield articles are the main draw (this is counting individual article hits only - blogger can't show tag requests AFAICT).  The SIDshield is something I definitively will continue working on, but I think I will focus more on VHDL once I'm in Rennes.  I think I will shift my focus on the research and MATLAB related content in the future.

Weirdly, I have only ever received one comment, on Further adventures with Mercurial, which is now effectively out of date (the relevant packages on the latest Ubuntu releases are at sufficiently high versions).  It's a pity; any blog writer really likes comments, it makes one feel relevant. :-)

Onwards to the next year of posting!