Amazing Research in Image Processing and Presentation

I recently stumbled upon a very interesting pair of research projects that started at the University of Washington.

The first is titled, Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene. The video toward the bottom of the screen demonstrates using still images to automatically enhance the resolution, lighting, and color of videos, along with the ability to mask sections of scene and replace them with substitute images.

The second project has been picked up by Microsoft Labs and further developed into Photosynth (unfortunately requiring a Windows-only browser plug-in). It allows you to view a set of images of the same subject in a 3-D browser. See this very cool video for several examples.

Odaiko New England Community Membership

Wow, I have a big back-log of potential blog entries! I'll start with a quick one.

My wife and I recently became community members of Odaiko New England, a wonderful Taiko (Japanese drumming) group. Being a community member isn't quite as exciting or as much of an honor as becoming a performing member, but we're still very proud of our achievement. Taiko is a wonderful activity combining music, exercise, and energy. If you'd like to try it out, there will be a free beginner class next Tuesday (August 5th). If you can't make that one, you can contact Mark to ask when the next class open to new students will be happening. I hope you'll give it a try. It's awesome!

Great Douglas Adams Quote

I came upon this quote linked to from another blog and loved it. What a shame that he died so young!

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams
English humorist & science fiction novelist (1952 - 2001)

Best Quote at JavaOne '08

"It's essentially impossible to avoid Swiss cheese." --Gil Tene, Azul Systems

Want to guess about the context? :)

Update: I think I've allowed enough time for everyone to guess. Jeff, with his more serious answer, was the closest. The quote came from the Q&A period that followed a Friday morning technical session, Performance Considerations in Concurrent Garbage-Collected Systems. Gil was explaining that whatever form of memory allocation you use, you'll eventually end up with memory fragmentation. In a JVM, if you use a garbage collector that's both parallel and concurrent, cleaning up that fragmentation can be done without a stop-the-world pause. Conveniently enough, the JVM that comes with Azul's boxes can be run in parallel/concurrent mode. :) Sorry that the quote is less funny when put in context.