Ten Years After Receiving My Doctor of Philosophy

Francis Bacon said, “History make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend”. Newton’s epoch-making achievement is his “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”. Today we just call it classical mechanics or Newtonian mechanics. In a letter written from Einstein to Thornton in 1944, “So many people today [...]

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Collected Quotes

Newton said, “If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results.” Laplace: “The calculus of probability was nothing but common sense reduced to calculation.” J. Maxwell “They say that understanding ought to work by the rules of right reason. These rules are, or ought to be, contained in logic; [...]

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From Heuristics to Principles (from Art to Science)

Throughout this semester, I mentioned the importance of skills to convert some heuristic observation into some principled methodology. In this blog, I would like to summarize several examples we have seen in image processing: 1. Heuristics: importance of edge orientation. It is easy to observe that an idealistic filtering should go along the edge orientation [...]

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Curiosity is the best teacher

In this week’s computer assignment, many of you faced the obstacle of It turns out only few students with biometrics background knows how to calculate this Receiver-Operational-Curve thing. You might feel disappointed since I never even mentioned the ROC in the class – “how am I supposed to work this out? it is not covered [...]

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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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Differential Equations: Linear vs. Nonlinear

It is usually extremely difficult to solve a nonlinear differential equation A[u]=0 directly but it may be much easier to discover the minimum or maximum points of an appropriate energy functional I(u) where A=I’. Such variational principle is advocated by Max Plank as a fundamental law in nature (e.g., relativity theory follows a geodesic path [...]

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