A Momentary Lapse of Reason and Celebration of The Lizard King

It’s been a few months that I have written something. Well, to write something substantial, I need work which I haven’t done in quite a long time. No commits, no contribution, no projects, no research, nothing! Procrastination all day long. I don’t even remember how I spent my last three months. Probably, listening to some of the best rock bands ever, partying, sleeping, watching movies about the best rock bands, playing Ultimate. No clue. I am the king of people who take bad decisions and no one can beat me at that. Turned down couple of internship opportunities, few projects, Robocon, and the list goes on and the last thing that I really don’t want to add is academics. Had a little tumble down the road. Basking in the glory, I forgot to return back to the ground. I tried to fly. So I threw myself at ground, but couldn’t miss the ground. Probably, I was trying to miss the ground. It turns out this has to happen accidentally.

Since I could not miss the ground, it hit me so hard. I finally met myself coming down an up staircase and the encounter was crushing.

The realization of not doing anything and still able to tweet about it is an achievement in itself. Well, I guess I still haven’t realized it. After reading few dozens of PhD comics, watching PhD movie, reading stuff up on Quora, reading about other masters program students, and all the post docs that I’m stalking for a 6 months thesis, I have come to a simple conclusion that everyone digs your work. And yeah, Masters programs are kind of overrated and yes, obviously, IITs. So enough of cribbing, it’s time to celebrate and plan the future.

As my finals are going on, I get enough time to think about further projects, goals and something.. something.. something.. The next semester is going to be very exciting. Couple of projects are already lined up, and given that I don’t repeat this semester. I’m going to teach Computer Vision to a class of 40 students - “Introduction to Computer Vision” which will include practical applications of Computer Vision with some theory and math. We’re going to use OpenCV and/or SimpleCV. Open Source is the right path. After getting crappy grades in Probability and Statistics, Linear Algebra, I have decided to take up a project in Statistical Learning - “Implementation of Statistical Learning Techniques to Estimate and Detect Objects in Computer Vision based Tracking”. I’m not planning to take up any of the coursera courses as I don’t go beyond three weeks and keep getting bunch of emails every week.

Recently, I have started looking into Mahotas. Luis Pedro maintains it. It’s an Image Processing/ Computer Vision library for Python. It does not use OpenCV. It has its own C++ bindings. I have started learning Python/C API. All the referencing, and pointers are giving me goosebumps. After using Python for a year, it feels so powerful to go back to pointers and getting segmentation faults.

Simultaneously, I’m working on object segmentation and haven’t had a breakthrough there. I have to start looking into statistical learning and start my project early as I need to make a tracker that can match the accuracy and agility of ALIEN.

Taking up all the work to cover for three months is going to kill me. Anyway, I have started learning Python/C API and the first post will be up soon with some warnings about certain unnecessary things that took me 8 hours to figure out. Memory allocation, dereferencing pointers, and segmentation faults will elude me.

Ooh great creator of being Grant us one more hour, To perform our art And perfect our lives.

P.S. I’m The Lizard King. I can do anything.

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