BOPs

BOP is the English (or Cambridge) term for Party.

We have several BOPs in our college. From what I've seen there is one every week or two. Two weeks ago we went for the Halloween party which was very fun. Most of the people were dressed in all kind of costumes. We had some beers and nice cocktails. The drinks in our bar are really cool and chip :)

Today there is a BOP with the 70's music. Next week we have our own Oktoberfest. This Darwin Oktoberfest seems very popular as tickets are already sold out.

On a side note, me and Dana are celebrating two years since our formal wedding :)

Hacking ciphers

We do many things but last week I did something particularly amazing (for me). It was the first time I've actually broken a cryptographic protocol.

For one of our courses (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/R08/) we had to do a presentation on one topic. So I did something in braking Smartcard's security (yes, those cards you use to take money out of an ATM or get Pay-TV services).

It was really fun when I got to implement a small crypto algorithm and also I got two different ways of hacking it.

Something also huge (again, for me...) is the presentation of our teacher on eavesdropping attacks. He can practically see ANYTHING is going on your monitor (laptop, LCD, whatever). He is able to see the contents of a monitor even 3 walls away, which means he can see anything you see !

Football Update

So I've been quite busy in the last weeks but I'll try to give some more updates.

One week ago we had another game, in which again we won :)

I need to mention the captain's comments:

"I don't like naming individuals for praise as I thought it was a team effort but I thought Simon was phenomenol with his work rate and effort (well deserved MOTM), Omar was an absolute rock in defence (particularly one tackle which is one of the best last ditch challenges I've seen in a 1s or 2s game - you'll need to be good to cover up for gums ;) ) and finally Jack R was outstanding as a central midfielder, really good passing and movement."

We had another game today: 3-0 (for us). We're practically unbeaten so far. If you want to follow our league check it here:

http://www.cuafc.org/index.php?option=com_joomleague&func=showresultsrank&p=3&division=12&Itemid=95&r=3

Yes, I do other stuff besides football :)

First Game First Win

Yesterday I had my first game (football) with Darwin's team. We made a great 3-0. I entered the field in the second half as I was new in the team. All the 3 goals were scored in this half, may be coincidence, may be not :). However, the game was nice.

Just a small citation from the captain:

"Great debuts from robust defender Omar, mercurial Rubens,..."

Cambridge Colleges

Ok I see some followers, that's great :)

I'll try to present my view on the Colleges at Cambridge.

So what are these colleges anyway? They are the extra-scholar environment of Cambridge students. They provide accommodation, food, social events, sport clubs, seminars, library, advice and much more.

They don't have anything to do with the studies, as many people think. Well, they provide advice on studies and your academic situation is related to the college as well, but you don't have classes in your college. When you apply to Cambridge you can pick any college you want. It doesn't matter what you want to study. Consider the college as your place for fun.

My college is Darwin (http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/). It is small in size, compared to Trinity, King's or Corpus Cristi, but it is in down town, close to my flat (see below), has a great and cheap bar (most people say it is the best pub in town), good food, many sport facilities and a very nice court yard by the Cam river. Also it has a great library, including all the books of Charles Darwin.

For a list of other colleges and may be some more info, check this:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/colleges/

Most of the colleges have single rooms for students. For couples (like me and Dana), they have flats near the college. We got a spacious 3 room flat. The main drawback is that is is very old, has a carpet that should have been changed many years ago, and it only has a bath, no shower. You should appreciate a lot having a shower in your home. Only when you get a flat like mine (without shower, just bath) you get to appreciate things like that. Well.. we'll try to improvise smth in the near future :D.

I've joined the football team at Darwin. We are more than 25 players, and we have two teams, each one playing in a different league, like the pro's and those just playing for fun. Actually I just got training today. We have games each week.

One week ago we had our fresher's Formal Dinner. That is, we all went dressed up in nice costumes (thanks Razvan for sending it) and we got a nice (free) dinner with all the members. We had time to chat and meet our Darwinian colleges. After the dinner we went to the bar downstairs and I must say it is really interesting to meet all these people with such different backgrounds and professions. I've never thought you can actually do a PhD in law. Well... it seems that I actually have several colleagues doing that.

The meals are each day (except Sunday), launch and dinner. The food is very good and the prices are as low as possible. Soup & Main course & coffee/tea 4 pounds.

Well.. I don't want to make it too boring, and Dana is calling for dinner. So I'll let you find more on the net if you want :)

Romanian Squad

When I've first applied to Cambridge for a PhD (2008) I was the only one in my generation to do so. I've contacted a Romanian PhD student in the Computer Laboratory to ask him about life and work there. He told me that he would be happy to have another Romanian colleague at Cambridge as he thought he was the only one in the department.

Well.. what do you know? In my MPhil we are 4 Romanians out of 40 students! They said that for this master they took the best around the world. Well, if 10% are Romanians I must say Romania is one of the smartest countries, which is great. I must mention anyway that I am one generation older than my other colleagues and another Romanian actually studied in England and actually he is 2 generations younger, so basically there is a huge coincidence in this year. However, Romania rulz :)

P.S. Clearly we have a lot of Chinese as well.. but that's just common these days.

Master at Cambridge

In this post I just want to give you an insight of how a MPhil (Master in Philosophy) in Computer Science is at Cambridge. I'll try to give all the aspects that come to my mind based on my 3 weeks here.

There are 3 terms (English partition probably..) equivalent with the old school trimesters. As a research master, we clearly have a lot of research to do.

We need to choose 6 courses (among 30 or so) over the first two terms (I have chosen 4 in the first term). For the remaining term, and part of the second one, we need to make this big research project. For some this could be considered as the graduation project (what we did at the university).

Each student gets a so-called "course advisor". You don't get to see much this person, but it is there "in case you need its help". I am not too sure what this means, clearly he/she is not there to do your homework. Actually I think I'm lucky because I've got to see my advisor already, as most of my colleagues didn't.

There are 3 types of courses: reading (Rxy), practical (Pxy) and lectures (Lxy) - xy are two bits given to differentiate the courses. On the reading courses you need to read a lot of papers (sometimes I get the feeling that I'm reading even more than when I was working in research). On the lectures you have the typical classes where the teacher speaks (I don't have any of those). In the practical courses, as the name says, you get to do smth practical. I am doing "Building an Internet Router", which is based on the Standford course and I find it really interesting as I am practically engineering the hardware of a router.

For the amount of work... well let's say that since I've started I didn't have more than a couple hours off. That is you are full. Actually if it would be to make everything perfect you couldn't afford to sleep, so basically you have to maintain a good balance between what you do and what you drop, while still keeping up.

On the facilities side I don't have any complain. We have a huge lab (Intel's lab) shared with the other undergraduates. Then there is the MPhil lab, where only we have access, which is very cool. Last but not least there is the MPhil room, where we have some nice sofas and a few computers. Overall the facilities are great, nothing to complain so far. Oh... and we have a relaxing room with a small billiard and foosball.

If you want to see more, check the website:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/acs.html

Just running out of time. I'll try to put updates (if anybody is actually interested in this stuff). I'll go on with seminars and may be colleges next time.

Cambridge

Shortly: from September 28th I'll be officially living at Cambridge.

So what happend with Toulouse and my PhD at IRIT?

Well... after many many turns around what to do (and nights without sleep) I've decided to follow my curiosity and go to Cambridge to study in the security field.

Actually this idea came well before knowing about IRIT. It all started in 2007 when I've met (virtually) prof. Ross Anderson, one of the best security experts in the world.

Before graduating (2008) I've met my former teacher , prof. Romulus Grigoras, and I enjoyed my internship at IRIT so I've decided to start a PhD there. However along the way came some economic troubbles (probably due to the crisis) and with these also some changes in my PhD. Just from nowhere I got an offer from Cambridge to start my PhD there. This took me by surprise as I wasn't really expecting a formal offer so late (my application was in December and response in June).

The period right after these news was a complete blurr. I wasn't sure at all on which direction to go: Toulouse, where I already had some articles and the path was set, or Cambridge where I would start from scratch my thesis but with a topic that intrigates me enormously. Also there was the big problem of money: in Toulouse I had everything, in Cambridge almost nothing. Fortunately in time the situation got better on the economic side for Cambridge as well.

So right now I am extremely curious to see how my new Master will be. Yeah... so I'll do a master prior to my PhD. Too many details to explain but the two main reasons for the master are: better financement on the PhD and better knowledge. Hopefully everything will turn well and I'll be able to get my PhD before the retirement of my good friend Razvan :).

iDTGV

In France, there are the well known TGVs (Tren a grand vitesse) which are, as the name says, trains which run at high speed.  Generally if you buy it in advance the price of a ticket is between 50 and 100 Euros for the common destinations (around 500 km distance).

I've seen some incredible offers for 19-30 Euros for some iDGTV. I was really curious where is the "trick" in this. So I've found this interesting article (take a look at the comments actually):

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/internet/0,39020774,39198930,00.htm

I found it interesting to know what is the main difference between iDGTV and a normal TGV. So the answer is "the service".

Mobile Augmented Reality

It's been a while since my last post but i've been busy. More concretely I've been working on an article submitted at ACM Multimedia 2009. I won't describe (yet) the whole content but I'll show a descriptive image:

The idea is that I show the hidden engravings of caves in real time using the mobile device. Seems cool? Well... I'll post a video of it soon.

The 6th sense

A friend of mine just point me to a very interesting article. It describes the technology to interact with both digital and real worlds in a fashion similiar to that in "Minority Report".

I think it is better to see the article and video. Check it here:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

If it doesnt work try this one:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/481

Don't let computers replace nature!

Reading some web articles, I found this one:

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/36824.php?source=rss

It speaks about the problem of using technology in such a way of completly forgeting about the real things. For e.g. the games which virtualize a dog or cat and where the users (usually the children) will play with this game instead of the real animal. A similar problem is caused by high-definition videos showing some of the great places in the earth (like Niagara Falls, or some mountains) which may convince people to just look at these videos instead of visiting the real nature. 

We've actually spoken about this problem in the last WMM '09 but the guy in the article (Peter Kahn, http://faculty.washington.edu/pkahn/) is actually doing some intensive research in the field. I highly appreciate what he's trying to defend.

CORESA & WMM 2009

Last week, 19-20 March 2009, we had organized the CORESA 2009 conference together with the Workshop on Multimedia Metadata 2009. See this website:

http://coresa2009.enseeiht.fr/

I've just realized how cool is to have your presentations posted anywhere. So here it is my presentation:

Mobile User Study at WMM '09

View more presentations from omar.choudary.

It was quite a fun experience. As an organizing and participating student I had a lot of activity. Firtst there were all the planning meetings and other tasks. Then of course the preparation of the presentation ... my presentation, as I was participating to the WMM also. I'll put the article on my website.  Also all the papers from the WMM (including mine) have been published here:

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-441

During the conference I enjoyed all the nice talks from the WMM experts as well as presentations from other PhD students. One of the great things was the chance to meet one of the mobile guide gurus, professor Timo Ojala, which was a very cool guy. Also WMM experts as Ralf, Harald, Christian or Mathias are really nice people to meet.

From the CORESA side I can't say much as I've been participating almost entirely at the WMM but from what I've heard it was very cool too. One of our colleagues presented a paper at the end of the conference.

We had a gala dinner at the Bemberg Foundation. This is a very nice (and old) building where Mr. Bemberg, which from what I've heard was very rich, has exposed his art collection which was big enough to make you busy more than 2 hours. More information can be found here:

http://www.fondation-bemberg.fr/

At the end everyone was happy with the organization (especially with the excellent transportation that we've provided... :D) and level of the conference so I can say it was successful. 

New Intelligent GPS device from NAVIGON

The company Navigon has created a GPS-based car navigation device which is "smart". Why? Because it seems that it can record the user preferences (roads, visited places, etc...) and provide the best choices for the user. It also comes with many other interesting features, like real views of exists. Check an article here or their website. 

Dell mini - it comes with GPS

It seems that Dell is trying to make laptops closer to smartphones than viceversa. The new Dell Inspiron mini 9 provides anything you need from a notebook and it has also GPS so that you don't get lost. 

Check it here

Cool Devices - new screens

In this post I want to present two new pieces of hardware that will surely make a difference in the display market.

First of all there is the Sony Flexible Screen , check this article: http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/24/sonys-worlds-first-16-7-million-color-flexible-oled/
The sony screen can actually display 16 million color in a flexible screen that is as thin as a normal sheet.

The second amazing display has been developed by Polymer Vision and is called "Readius". It is an e-book reader which means that it can display the content of electronic books (files stored on a digital media, e.g. hard-disk, USB stick, etc...). What is the big advantage of this one? Its screen can be folded! Yes, and it fits in your pocket (check Youtube for Readius e-book reader).
It has a memory of 8GB, but you can connect USB devices and it also has mobile broadband connection (e.g. HSDPA). There is no cost known at this moment but it could be interesting to follow this one.

The "Readius" device is not a first display to read electronic books, but it is the first one to fold and fit in the pocket. The original device I think it might be the Amazon's Kindle. Check it on Amazon, it costs about 360$ but it is extremelly popular, as they don't have any device on stock.

Cool Devices - 2008 overview

I will start a series of posts regarding new and cool devices that I discover.

Let's start with what exists, regarding smartphones. First, there is the cool and fun Nokia N95 that we already have at the institute. There are a lot of cool applications for this phone and many of them are actually amazing. Check this site: http://www.nokia.com/betalabs to see a lot of cool ideas.

One of the hot devices of the last year was clearly the Google G1, created by HTC, Google and T-Mobile. It has a lot of features, it is the first smartphone running the Android OS, has an electronic compass so you don't get lost in the woods :) Btw.. if you want one you don't need to sign a contract with T-Mobile, you can buy it unlocked !?! (yes, unlocked) from the android market website (google for Android Market and you'll find it).

The big hero of 2008 of course, the iPhone. Only one phone has been able to get almost 10 % of the phone market, it's unbelliveble. Lots of applications for it on the apple store. I am still a fan of Nokia even if the iPhone is really cool :)

Now my favourite... the Nokia N97 . You must check this phone out. It is really amazing. I don't know exactly if it features a GPU like the N95 but it has a huge touchscreen, a full qwerty keyboard that slides out under the phone, all the nice features of a cool smartphone (5MP camera Carl Zeiss optics, GPS, accelerometer, 32GB of memory - OMG -). This smartphone will be available in the mid 2009.

Some other cool devices that have appeared in 2008 are the Blackberry Bold (they say it has an unique touch-screen) and the Samsung INNOV8 which features an 8MP camera (huge!).

2009 New Year Resolution

So here we are in a new year. I am sure it will be another year full of surprises and I am sure it will be the same for many people as the economic crizis is shaking the world but let's wish everyone a happy new year.

Together with the new year I am currently working on a new article. I am not sure about the title but it sounds like this: "A user study on rich media mobile guide applications". At the institute I created two prototype mobile guide applications comparing them with google maps and nokia maps. Never heard of them? Go to http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/maps and http://www.google.com/gmm/ to see what they are about.

We'll try to participate with this article to the CORESA conference. Check the website: http://coresa2009.enseeiht.fr/