Musings — mostly about color art, science, and technology
When you publish an article, you want it to be discoverable by other researchers. This requires that it be indexed. Indexing systems need metadata, which they usually extract from the PDF files in digital libraries or other document repositories. Ideally, a manuscript submission system collects the necessary metadata from the corresponding author when the final manuscript is submitted. Since…
Previous related posts: Career Networking , Scholarly Publications . With the industrial revolution, large companies introduced central research laboratories to accelerate the invention of new products. After the Sputnik crisis, in the USA these laboratories became very prestigious, under the influence of people like Joseph Licklider . The labs flourished, receiving government jobs paid under the…
The evolution of approaches to employment was discussed here . Fifty years ago, a professor in the mathematics department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) was expected to publish a substantial paper every two years, at least one every 4 years. The paper was top quality and presented a true advance in the field. Once a year, the professor would also present at a conference. When…
One of the main avenues to increase the quality of life and the welfare of society is to become more efficient. Concerning one of our most labor-saving devices, the computer, in the last decade, we have not done so well. While previously it had liberated us from typewriters and slide rulers, recently it has been distracting us with social media and CPU power has barely improved, although computers…
In the US, the multigenerational workforce is divided into five age groups, which have quite different approaches to employment. The traditionalists (or silent generation, born 1925–1945), have these stereotypical characteristics: striving for financial security; "waste not, want not"; nobility of sacrifice for the common good; focus on quality and simplicity; loyal to employers and expect loyalty…
Formal written question to our Newell Road neighbor, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Edgewood Drive: Describe how your business philosophy distinguishes the harm to individuals from the harm to society. The officially recorded answer for posterity: We recognize that we have made mistakes, and we are committed to learning from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community…
Today, the Swiss Federal Council appointed Martina Hirayama as the new State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation at the request of the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research EAER. Martina Hirayama has been president of the Institute Council of METAS, the Federal Institute of Metrology, since 2012. She has also been vice president of the board of Innosuisse,…
The Silicon Valley has seen radical changes in how people work. By people, I mean mostly the creative professionals who conceive the products that made the valley famous. Today, these professionals are not as creative as in the past. We are transitioning to the gig economy, where professionals do not have a fixed job but use the internet to find small assignments. The pay is very low, there are no…
On 25 April 2018, the European Commission increased its investment in AI research to €1.5 billion for the period 2018-2020 under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. This investment is expected to trigger an additional €2.5 billion of funding from existing public-private partnerships, for example on big data and robotics. It will support the development of AI in key sectors, from…
5 April 2018, there will be a public workshop on medical head-mounted displays in Stanford. The workshop is designed to support collaborations between the engineers who are developing VR and AR technologies and the surgeons and clinicians who are using these technologies to treat their patients. The workshop features talks by researchers who are developing VR and AR technologies to advance…
On 23 January 2018, Claudio Oleari passed away at the age of 73 in Reggio Emilia. He was the last and ultimate authority on the OSA-UCS color space and perceptually uniform color. He was an eminent physics scholar and an associate professor at the University of Parma, at the Department of Physics and Earth Sciences. He devoted his life to the activities of teaching with the same passion and…
If you have an extra ~5 minutes please try out our online perceptual similarity sorting experiment . This is follow-up to the work that Michael Ludwig (one of our summer interns from last summer ) conducted and is continuing to work on as part of his PhD research. For more details, please see this about page for the experiment. Thank you.
The so-called Twitter Anomaly Detection function for R is excellent but also very minimalistic. The input is a two-column data frame where the first column consists of the timestamps and the second column contains the observations. In addition to a plot, the output is a data frame comprising timestamps, values, and optionally, expected values. In practice, we usually have some semantic information…
If you are still looking to give a Christmas or year's end gift that can make a big impact , consider a school in one of the poorest counties in the USA. It is the Lakota Waldorf School in Kyle, SouthDakota, the only Waldorf School on an Indian Reservation. Swiss native Isabel Stadnick is one of the founders and current administrator, and her husband Robert Stadnick is a tribal member. In 1992,…
A team from the ETH in Zurich and the University College in Dublin has been able to demonstrate a 3D printing approach to create bacteria-derived functional materials by combining the natural diverse metabolism of bacteria with the shape design freedom of additive manufacturing. They have developed a biocompatible hydrogel with optimized rheological properties that allows for the immobilization of…
Scientific freedom and scientific responsibility are essential to the advancement of human knowledge for the benefit of all. Scientific freedom is the freedom to engage in scientific inquiry, pursue and apply knowledge, and communicate openly. This freedom is inextricably linked to and must be exercised in accordance with scientific responsibility. Scientific responsibility is the duty to conduct…
Arimo was born Adatao in 2013 and is being acquired by Panasonic . It calls its product Behavioral AI and targets it to machine learning for Industry 4.0. It started with two tools. pAnalytics is a Spark environment providing an API where developers can work with the data and expose it to the end users with charts and graphs. pInsights is the end user layer, which takes natural language queries.…
This morning, #45 announced a massive tax relief for the American people . Also as of this morning, the new iPhone X is available for purchase in Apple stores. If you are investing your massive tax relief in an iPhone X , do not just look at the gorgeous OLED screen, but also at the 3d face recognition sensor, because you have been reading about the underlying physics on this blog. It has been…
SCIEN has resumed at Stanford with the talk Computational Near-Eye Displays with Focus Cues by Gordon Wetzstein . This presentation is an overview of research at Stanford. Inflection points in near-eye displays: 1838 Stereoscopes by Wheatstone, Brewster, … 1968 Ivan Sutherland 1995 Nintendo Virtual Boy 2012–2017 VR explosion Currently, the big enablers are the smartphone components. The main…
The latest issue of Science magazine has an article explaining how the retinotopic map is built during the development of the eye. The authors show that glial cells that ensheath axons relay cues from photoreceptors to induce the differentiation of the photoreceptor target field—the so-called lamina neurons. Thus, glia can play an instructive role in differentiation, helping to direct the…
The 4 August issue of Science (Vol. 357, Issue 6350, eaan0221) has a valuable article on the biology of color describing the current state of the art in this interdisciplinary field of animal coloration. This article is important because in the past 20 years there has been significant progress in this field.
Monday evening, Gioia Deucher , the new CEO of swissnex San Francisco on Pier 17, hosted a double event on critical thinking. The first event was only for ETH alumni and consisted of networking followed by a speech by ETH President Lino Guzzella and a general discussion. Prof. Guzzella noted that in recent years, students have changed and despite social media have become much nerdier and socially…
At the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, Martin Seligman and more than 20 psychologists, physicians, and computer scientists in the World Well-Being Project used machine learning and natural language processing to sift through Twitter. They have been able to rank each of the 3235 U.S. counties according to well-being, depression, trust, and five personality traits. For the…
At the 2018 IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging (EI 2018), taking place 28 January – 1 February 2018 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport, Burlingame, California, Prof. Daniele Marini is organizing a joint session on imaging and astronomy. This new session brings together amateur and professional astronomers, vision scientists, color scientists, astrophysicists, data…