Advices on Improving Mathematical and Programming Skills

Based on my interaction with some of you, mathematics and programming skills are likely to be two deciding factors in your success of doing research in various fields (e.g., image processing, biometrics, communication, networking etc.). Therefore, it is inevitable to feel the frustration over some difficult papers (involving deep mathematics) or challenging projects (involving a [...]

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What is More Important than Grade

I understand some of you might be upset about losing some point in CA#2. Now here is the bright side: if you look at the grading system, an A grade is 90/100 – so there is a comfort zone where you can lose as many as 10 points. In fact, usually I also give out [...]

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Stuff related to AR but not covered in the class

Due to time constraint, we will have to say farewell to the topic of autoregressive(AR) model and move to a new chapter today. However, there are still many interesting stuff related to AR you can dig into: 1) Usefulness of AR. As I mentioned in the class, AR model is more successful on speech than [...]

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What can you achieve more than finishing an assignment?

I was kept busy during the office hours today and glad to see many of you have put significant effort into the first computer assignment. Well, like I said in one of my emails, this assignment might appear easy from a coding (programming) perspective; but there are a lot more that you can learn than [...]

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Simple Idea Wins

Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The idea of using linear combination to characterize the dependency among data samples is a simple one; while its impact has been lasting (as I briefly mentioned in the class, one way of checking whether some theory or technology has a [...]

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What is a Scientific Understanding?

What is science? According to wiki, “Science refers in its broadest sense to any systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome.” It should be noted that the history of science is not that long – when compared with the history of art, engineering and [...]

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The Relationship of Mathematics to Image Processing

Starting from this week, we will start our discussion on mathematical models and their role in image processing. Before we proceed with technical details such as what is Markov Random Field, total-variation regularization or wavelet shrinkage, it is important to understand why we need mathematical models in the first place. If you have not read [...]

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