HKHC Goals

Many of you may be wondering what it is we do. Here are some of our primary goals:

1. Engage the community in a dialogue about healthy eating (HE) and active living (AL) policy, and what it means to you

2. Promote HE and AL policy and environmental change in the City of Buffalo

3. Work with the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Board for AL matters

4. Conduct a citywide assessment of policy conditions, physical and environmental landscape, and organizational capacity with respect to HE and AL - what does Buffalo look like right now? What are our assets? What are we missing?

5. Support the development of a Food Policy Council

6. Determine additional needs of HE and AL community in Buffalo

Now is the time to get involved! Contact Jessie at jhersher@bnmc.org to learn more.

What is Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities?

Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities - or HKHC - is a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that focuses on policy- and environmental-change that increases opportunities for physical activity and healthy eating -- leading to better overall health.

Why is this important? Good health goes beyond "not being sick." Good health includes eating right, getting enough exercise and feeling good about ourselves.

We, HKHC Buffalo, want to continue the conversation about healthy eating and active living in Buffalo. We want to hear from you - the residents of the City of Buffalo - about what makes a healthy community. We hope to hear from all ages, and will have activities and sessions geared towards youth and adults. We are getting ready to kick-off with our first event in the coming weeks so watch for more information!

You can also check out more about HKHC at the national level at http://www.healthykidshealthycommunities.org.

ICVSS 2010: Have you cited Lagrange?

Yeah, I have. :) Before the beginning of the summer school we received a homework assignment from Prof. Stefano Soatto. We had to read the three papers and discover the roots of ideas exploited by the authors. Such connections are not obligatory expressed by references. As a result, one had to get a tree (or, may be, lattice) with a root in the given paper. Since the task was not accurately formulated, most of us chose just one paper and made a tree for it. Later it turned out that all three problems (optical flow estimation, multi-view stereo and volume registration) have the same roots because they lead to the similar optimization problems and we were supposed to establish that connection.

I (like most of the students) had a limited time to prepare the work. All the modern research in optical flow is based on two seminal papers by MIT's Horn & Shunk and CMU's Lukas & Kanade, both from 1981. During the last 30 years a lot of work has been done. It was summarized by Sun et al. (2010), who discovered that only small fraction of the ideas give significant improvement and combined them into quite simple method that found its place on the top of Middlebury table. Since I had no time to read a lot of optical flow papers, I discovered a lot of math stuff (like PDEs and variation calculus) used in Horn-Shunk paper. Just as a joke I added references to the works of Newton, Lagrange and d'Alambert to my report. Surprisingly, joke was not really understood.

There were only 21 submissions, one of them was 120 pages long (the author did not show up at the seminar =), the tree depth varied from 1 to 20. I was not the only one who cited "pre-historic" papers, someone traced ideas back to Aristotle through Occam. The questions about the horizon arose: it is really ridiculous to find the roots of computer vision at Aristotle works. Since the prizes were promised for rare references (the prize policy was left unclear too), some argument took place. Soatto did not give any additional explanations on the formulation of the task but let the audience decide which references are legitimate in controversial cases. Eventually, I was among the 5 people whose references were considered controversial, so I needed to defend them. Well, I suppose I looked pretty pathetic talking about Newton's finite differences which were used for approximation of derivatives in the Horn-Shunk's paper. Surprisingly, almost a half of the audience voted for me. =) Also, my reference to the Thomas Reid's essay was tentatively approved.

Finally, there were no bonuses for the papers that could not be found with Google, and the whole $1000 prize went to the Cambridge group. To conclude, Soatto (among other) said that nobody had read any German or Russian papers. After the seminar I told him how I tried to dig into the library (it is described here in Russian), he answered something like "funny, it is hard to find them even for you!"

One evening during the dinner we talked about Russia, and Vijay told a lot of interesting stuff (like the guy who developed ChatRoulette is now working in Silicon Valley). He remembered Stephen Boyd who is known for his jokes about Russia. I said that I watched the records of his amazing course on Convex Optimization. It turned out that Vijay (who is now a PhD student in Stanford) took that course, and he promised to tell Boyd that he has a fan in Russia. (Or, maybe in Soviet Russia fans have Boyd =).

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the house is a little quieter....

okay A LOT quieter, now that my biggest kiddo is off at camp for the week....

it's amazing how easy it gets w/ a baby when the big sister is away. warren and i feel like we are on vacation! we went on a long walk, visited w/ friends and drank wine, cooked a yummy dinner, watched a strange movie, cleaned the house (and it stayed that way), slept in a little...and now i can actually sit at the computer and have time to do things while the baby takes his AM nap.

it's going to be a nice week....BUT i have to admit, i already miss my girl...

*images courtesy of style beat, i heart you, donna giffith, poppy & leo, oh hello friend

ICVSS 2010: lectures and posters

I returned from my eurotrip yesterday and now I am ready to start a series of posts about International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS 2010). Generally, I enjoyed the school. That week gave me (I hope) a lot of new knowledge and new friends.

The scientific programme of the school included lectures, tutorials, a student poster session and a reading group. Lectures occupied most of official programme time and were given by a great team of professors including Richard Szeliski, renowned Tomasso Poggio and enchanting Kristen Grauman. I am not going to describe all the talks, but feature the ones that are close to my interests. You can find the complete programme here. Unfortunately, no video was recorded, but I have an access to all the slides and posters, so if you are interested in anything, I can send it to you (I believe it does not violate any copyrights).

Wednesday was the day of Recognition. Kristen Grauman gave a talk about visual search. She covered the topics concerning specific object search using local descriptors and bags of words, object category search with pyramid matching, and also discussed state-of-the-art in the challenging problem of web-scale image retrieval. Mark Everingham continued with a talk about category recognition and localization using machine learning techniques. Localization is reached using bounding boxes, segments, or object parts search (like finding eyes and a mouth to find a face). Sure he could not avoid to mention importance of context. He also explained the PASCAL VOC evaluation protocol.

The tutorials covered some applications and did not really impress me. Poster session was a great opportunity to meet people. Some posters were really decent, for example Michael Bleyer's poster on dense stereo estimation using soft segmentation, which won a half of the school's best presentation prize. The work was done with Microsoft Research Cambridge, they formulated a really complicated energy function based on surface plane estimations and minimized it with Lempitsky's graph-cut based fusion-move algorithm (2009). More details could be found in their recent CVPR paper.

The problem with the poster session was that lecturers did not attend it, although they could really give a great feedback. My presentation was in the last day of the session after the not-really-popular reading group and in the room upstairs (its existence was not a well-known fact :), so many people preferred to spend that evening on the beach. The school audience was quite heterogeneous, there were a lot of people from medical imaging, video compression etc., so I had to explain some basics (like MRFs) to some students interested in my poster. There were also really smart guys (like those from Cambridge group). There was a bit of useful feedback: someone recommended me to use QPBO for inference, and I should probably consider it.

Since the speakers did not attend the poster session, students had to communicate with them informally. A roommate of mine, Ramin, who does a crowd analysis, caught Richard Szeliski and asked him about local descriptors in video that operate in 3D image-time space. Szeliski told that it is a promising field and even remembered Ivan Laptev's name. During our tour to Ragusa Ibla I asked Mark Everingham (who is probably the closest of all speakers to my topic) about 3D point cloud classification. He said it was not really his field, but it should be fruitful to analyse clouds not only in local levels, and stuff like multi-layer CRFs could be useful. During the last 2 years there appeared a few papers that exploit that simple intuitive idea and incorporate shape detectors with CRFs, but it usually looks awkward. Well, may be smartly designed multi-layer CRFs might be really useful. It is funny, when I told Everingham that I'm from Moscow he replied that it was great, Moscow has a great math school and remembered Vladimir Kolmogorov. So, our education seems to be not so terrible. :D

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