coordmaps
Our interactive application to georeference outdoor web camera views has been published on GitHub .
Learning Bits
Logging the Progress
Latest posts
E-AI Summer Workshop on Products and Services
I gave a presentation at the E-AI Summer Workshop on Products and Services on how we use machine learning to develop our QC system for surface data and to communicate its results. The parts about the statistical evaluation of QC tests and the computation of the probabilistic plausibility have been presented before. The middle part is new, and shows the result of Francesco 's internship, where we…
GCOS SwissPhenocam Publications
The first two papers of the GCOS SwissPhenocam project are now available online. The project evaluates the potential of web cameras for phenological observations, and is conducted jointly with the Ecovision lab of Prof. Wegner at the University of Zürich and the Ecosystem Ecology group of Prof. Gessler at the WSL institute.
camvis2 - Deep Learning for Visibility Estimation
Nicola will be presenting our recent progress on using deep learning models for camera-based visibility estimation at this year's CIMO TECO conference.
photocast in the Media
Our work on photographic visualization of weather forecasts has made it to TV , as part of a segment on AI applications for meteorology :-) Thank you to Daniele Nerini for the presentation.
Photographic Visualization of Weather Forecasts
Our paper on photographic visualization of weather forecasts has been published in Volume 2, Issue 1 of Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems (AIES), which is a recently established journal of the American Meteorological Society.
Colloquium in Climatology, Climate Impact and Remote Sensing
I was invited by Céline Portenier and Stefan Wunderle to present our work on photographic visualizations of weather forecasts in the Colloquium in Climatology, Climate Impact and Remote Sensing at the University of Berne. This was also an opportunity to expand the presentation and include more background information about GANs and our latest evaluation results. Many thanks for the great discussion…
ECMWF Machine Learning Workshop
The 2022 ECMWF Machine Learning Workshop provided a virtual forum for the discussion of machine learning applications for NWP and climate services. I presented our work on using GANs to create photographic visualizations of weather forecasts .
Digital Society Position Paper on ADMS
I am a member of the Digital Society working group on automated decision making systems (ADMS). We have published the first version of our position paper on how ADMS should be regulated to benefit humanity. The scope of our proposal includes ADMS that make, or at least support, decisions in a fully automated way using technical systems. Our proposed legal framework is technology-neutral, instead…
KNMI Data Science Symposium
KNMI held a one day symposium on various aspects of data science for meteorology and climatology. I was invited to present our approach to data-driven quality control of meteorological observations.
MET Alliance ET-AUTO OBS Meeting
The MET Alliance is a group of "national aeronautical meteorological service providers from eight European States that cooperate on further improvement and rationalisation of the meteorological services for aviation". I was invited to give an overview of our past and current efforts on camera-based visibility estimation to the expert team on AUTO OBS.
EUMETNET Workshop on AI for Weather and Climate
The EUMETNET Workshop on AI for Weather and Climate took place at the Royal Meteorological Institute in Brussels - my last opportunity to travel abroad in 2020. I presented our work on data-driven QC and probabilistic plausibility, and briefly mentioned other machine learning activities that are happening in the measurements and data department at MeteoSwiss.
Paperboy
Our paper on "Detecting temperature induced spurious precipitation in a weighing rain gauge" has been published in Meteorologische Zeitschrift, Vol. 28, No. 3. I have contributed to the QC part of "Homogeneity assessment of phenological records from the Swiss Phenology Network", which has been published in the International Journal on Biometeorology, Vol. 64, Issue 1.
EUMETNET STAC WG on Automated Quality Control
I'm a member of the newly founded EUMETNET Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee Working Group on Automated Quality Control. At our first meeting in Exeter, the members presented the data processing and quality control methodologies of their respective met services. I gave a talk on some of the aspects of the MeteoSwiss data processing pipeline, with a detailed introduction to probabilistic…
Bluetooth Ache
Having trouble to connect wireless headphones with your MacBook? Re-activating Bluetooth in the menu bar doesn't help? Start the Bluetooth connection, then click on the Wi-Fi symbol.
Fan SDR Hacking for the Intel S1200V3RP Motherboard [updated]
After a discussion with Andrew Su, this post has been updated to include information on how to select the temperature sensor that controls the fan speed. I run a home server built around the Intel S1200V3RP motherboard. To minimize noise levels, it is housed inside a Fractal Design Define Mini case, driven by three Scythe Slip Stream 120 PWM case fans and a Noctua NH-U12S CPU fan. Contrary to…
First Steps with the Feitian ePass2003 Smart Token in OS X [updated]
This post has been updated for Yosemite and now mentions bugs in Apple's version of ssh-add . Thanks to Fredrik Pettai for letting me know. I don't feel at ease with private keys and other sensitive files floating around on multiple machines and backups. They are of course encrypted, but not accounted for, so it is impossible to "take them back" if ever something goes wrong with a passphrase.…
Android Privacy
I recently switched from iOS to Android with the goal of obtaining more control over my smartphone. One major question was if I could significantly reduce the amount of data I would have to "share" with the ecosystem provider (now Google instead of Apple) and with third party app developers. I do not have a personal Google account and don't use their services except for web search and Maps, and…
Publishing Octopress over FTPES
My webhost does not support ssh , the only secure transfer method that they provide is FTPES . I therefore had to put together my own Octopress deployment method. Since rake generate also copies unchanged files to public/ (and thus modifies their mtime stamps), I combine the following three steps to only upload changed files and delete stale files on the server: Use checksum-based rsync locally to…
Canonical Correlation Analysis under Constraints
" nscancor " is an R package for canonical correlation analysis (CCA) under constraints. As the name implies, the nscancor function has the same interface as cancor from the "stats" package, but supports enforcing constraints on the canonical vectors, such as non-negativity and sparsity. The implemented algorithm is based on iterated regression ( Sigg et al., 2007 ), and generalized deflation (…
Preventing rMBP Thermal Meltdown
My Retina MacBook Pro (early 2013 model) has been too quiet lately. I suspect that either the recent EFI or SMC updates modified the fan control curves, with the result that the fans stay at 2000 RPM independent of thermal load. Running multi-threaded code, such as par2tbb which takes all the cores that it gets, quickly overheats the processor to the point of emergency shutdown. At first I thought…
My Strategy for Personal Backups
A sane backup strategy is guided by the data recovery needs and the appropriate threat model. Executing it must be effortless, or else it won't be followed through. As with every technical system, the backup system must be validated by testing - a backup is worthless unless the lost data can be restored from it. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. To minimize the residual risk, good…
Non-Negative Sparse PCA Comparison
Version 0.4 of the nsprcomp package brings several improvements: The various deflation methods have been replaced with generalized deflation ( Mackey, 2009 ), which directly optimizes the additional variance explained by each component. Implementing generalized deflation required changes to the inner EM loop, and I was unsure at first whether they could be made efficient for high dimensional data.…
nsprcomp is on CRAN
When we published our 2008 ICML paper on sparse and non-negative PCA, I thought it might be worthwhile to provide a Matlab implementation of our algorithm as well. Since then, I've received several requests and questions about the code. While the core functionality is there, the implementation lacks a friendly interface and some additional functionality, such as easy random restarts. After two…
Evoluent Upright Mouse 4
I sometimes get funny feelings in my wrists. Shopping for hardware recently, I found the Evoluent Upright Mouse 4. Its fundamental idea is intriguing: holding the mouse with the wrist in a vertical position provides a welcome change from resting the hand horizontally on the keyboard. Evoluent argues that the position is less tiresome because it avoids twisting the radius and ulna bones. I don't…