Time management

The November 2007 version of Randy Pausch's lecture on Time Management is packed with great advice (from Covey's 4 quadrants to Pareto's Law to keeping your Inbox empty) and Randy's engaging presentation style. Well worth checking it out! 

The host of that talk at the University of Virginia, Prof. Gabriel Robins, also maintains a web page with many links and resources associated with the legacy of Randy Pausch. 

Science: a language of hope and inspiration

Excellent op-ed by Brian Greene in the New York Times. Don't miss it!

Scholarpedia

Just discovered (and signed up for) Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed and rigorously managed alternative to Wikipedia (and some of the criticism it receives when used as authoritative source, see e.g. the article "Why you can't cite Wikipedia in my class” by Neil L. Waters).

I came to it through the entry on Visual Salience, whose curator is Laurent Itti. 

Updates from Klagenfurt

It's been a while since my last post... Time for some updates...

My stay at Klagenfurt University is quickly approaching its end. It has been a very successful period, by every measure. Here are some highlights since my last posting:

• Last Friday we had the last day of classes, including presentations and project demonstrations by students. They did a superb job using a variety of languages, tools, and techniques to create Visual Information Retrieval (VIR) solutions and produced excellent prototypes and reports. 
  
• Four PhD students in the class expressed interest in continuing working with me on focused topics that build on the knowledge they acquired during the course. This is excellent news and a good sign of high-quality demos and papers within a few months.
• Mathias Lux and I are busy preparing our second paper together in which we propose an innovative approach for tag classification and noisy tag removal in social image sharing sites such as flickr.
• I am also very busy putting the final touches on my technical talk on "Image retrieval using computational models of visual attention" this Friday. It is part of a mini-workshop that starts with a talk by Ansgar Scherp (whom I first met in Innsbruck back in March) titled "Towards an Ecosystem for Semantics".
• All around Klagenfurt, the expectations for the beginning of the UEFA EuroCup 2008 are running high. The competition starts on Saturday and the first game in Klagenfurt will happen on Sunday night.