Jun 24 2009

Underground History of American Education

Published by Pranay under Uncategorized

by: John Taylor Gatto

coburn1

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Jun 08 2009

Mail server…:(

Published by Pranay under Uncategorized

I just found out today that my mail server in VA was down.  Well, actually it wasn’t down exactly; it was trying to come back up.  My mail server’s spam filter didn’t start-up on reboot. So when there was a power failure a little while back, the machine just sat there rejecting any/all email.  It would have started up on its own but I had to disable windows server’s shutdown ‘reason’ tracking.  Anyway, I’ve done all that now, so the machine should be able to restart with email fully functional now…

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May 10 2009

Cooking Gujarati Style

Published by Pranay under Homestuff

Since I had nothing to do today (for once), I decided to fire up the old pressure cooker and cook up somthin’ home style - that’s guju home-style.

This pic shows the spices I use in my cooking.  If you don’t know what these spices are…go get some culture. ; )

If you are guju, you know what this is (both: spices and container)

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Mar 04 2009

Update…

Published by Pranay under Uncategorized

I have been meaning to update my blog with the HAAR filter and other goodies, but I have been pretty bogged down at my new job.  As you can imagine, working at DreamWorks (not to mention relocating to a new place) leaves very little time for blogging.  But once things settle down, I’ll post the wavelet example and more…

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Feb 16 2009

Light (India ‘07)

Published by Pranay under Photos

small

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Feb 11 2009

Dawkins and Guppies

Published by Pranay under Ramblings

fish
In one of his talks, Richard Dawkins discusses an observation of guppies in insolated pools of water. In one pool there are predators with the guppies and in another there are no predators at all. Over the course of evolution the guppies in the pool without predators evolved to have different vibrant coloring; the guppies in the pool with predators, dull, muddied coloring.

The reason there is more variation in the first pool, Dawkins explains, is due to the fact that the selection pressures that would be introduced by a resident predator are not present; leaving the primary selection pressure, sexual selection, as the main evolutionary control. Female guppies choose male guppies based on their coloring (perhaps this is simply because of their greater visibility).  Vibrant coloring would have been selected out of the pool with predators as colorful guppies would be equally visible to mates as well as predators.

This just illustrates how over predation kills variation in prey.  You just end up with ugly guppies that taste good to insatiable predators.

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Feb 11 2009

Neural Edge Detector Training Examples

Published by Pranay under C++, Image Processing, Programming

Here you can see different results obtained from the Neural Edge Detector.  Underneath each image is the number of training cycles used to train the network.  It is pretty obvious from these results that increasing the number of training cycles results in a “more informed” determination of edge/non-edge pixels. 

 

Training Examples

 

I have created a simple example that you can run yourself.  In the .zip file below you will find a folder that containes the above images as well as the (win32) ProcessImages.exe application.  There is also a sub-folder which contains different network descriptions (layers/nodes/thresholds/weights).  To use this example, on the command line, you simply type the command name with the appropriate network file and image file:

ProcessImages <networkFile> <imageFile>

 

Example:

ProcessImages “NetworkFiles/SavedNetwork-10000-0.1.txt” originalsmall.jpg

 

File:

Training Tests

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Feb 09 2009

Neural Networks for Edge Detection

Published by Pranay under C++, Image Processing, Programming

After implementing the Sobel and Laplace edge detection algorithms and building my neural network library, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could apply the pattern association aspect of neural networks to the edge detection problem.  It turns out to be an awesome idea.

 

neuraledge

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Feb 05 2009

Image Processing workbench + Laplace & Gaussian

Published by Pranay under C++, Image Processing

I have written a small Image Processing Workbench that will allow me to easily explore different Image Processing algorithms.

gauslap

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Feb 04 2009

Lion Park in South Africa

Published by Pranay under Photos

I took this picture in South Africa a couple of years ago. It’s the best picture from the whole trip.

d9_lionpark-070

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