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.