Archive for the ‘career’ Category
Posted by eduardovalle on Wednesday, April 14, 2010
I have just arrived (suitcases still to be undone) from my trip to the USA. This time, I went to Philadelphia for the MIR Conference, where I have presented a poster on the work of my student Fábio Faria. I have met many interesting people at MIR and heard exciting, new ideas from them, but (without any intention to dismiss the hard work of the organizers) I must confess I was expecting a more diverse array of works (especially considering how broad the “Multimedia” community is).
Instead, I was astonished by how much the presented selection was similar in terms of technical foundation: classification based on discriminant approach (almost always using SVM) and representation based on “bags of visual features”. It is not that those do not interest me — after all, our own work is sits squarely on those pillars — but I was very interested in hearing about, seeing other approaches: generative models based on latent or explicit semantics, representations based on constellation models — what do I know ? — perhaps something completely new, which I haven’t even heard about.
I was left wondering why those “competing theories” were so notably absent. Has the community decided that SVM + Bags of Features is so conspicuously better than everything else ? (If that is the case, I would like to know how they reached this conclusion — though I like the results given by the pair “bags + SVM”, I am far from considering the “case closed”).
Was it self-selection by the autors, who didn’t submit their works to this particularly community ?
Or — and this is obviously the worst scenario— have all the alternative works been retained at the peer review barrier, because ideological considerations have (maybe unconsciously?) tainted the assessment of quality. I would like to quick dismiss this latter possibility, but the similarity between the works was really astounding. My student Otávio Penatti, who is on his first months of Ph.D. (he was there presenting a demo of his M.Sc. work) remarked it immediately.
I was very glad, nevertheless, to have this opportunity to visit Philadelphia. It was a very moving experience for me, because it gave me a very concrete, very immediate realization of how strongly The Enlightenment was shining in America at that time.
* * *
Otávio and I have profited from our travel to the USA to visit Prof. Edward Fox in Virginia Tech, who was the former Ph.D. advisor of Otávio’s current Ph.D. avidsor and my Post-Doc advisor Prof. Ricardo Torres. We have an ongoing cooperation with Prof. Fox. In fact, while we were there, we have met a Brazilian colleague of ours, Nadia Kozievitch, who is spending an year of her Ph.D. with Prof. Fox.
While we were there, we gave a talk on our current work and got acquainted with several exciting projects Prof. Fox is conducting, on a broad array of applications of digital libraries, including identification of fingerprints, biodiversity databases, e-Science, cooperation for crisis situations, and education.
We have also met Brazilian Prof. João Setúbal, who showed us the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, and talked about his work in genomics, and the new field of transcriptonics.
We were very impressed not only with the infra-structure of Virginia Tech, but also with the kindness and attentiveness of everyone who received us.
Posted in career, science | Tagged: bioinformatics, cooperation, Edward Fox, Fábio Faria, João Setúbal, MIR 2010, Nadia Kozievitch, Otávio Penatti, paper, publication, Ricardo Torres, UNICAMP, USA, Virginia Tech | 2 Comments »
Posted by eduardovalle on Wednesday, September 9, 2009
My tutorial Similarity Search and Indexing for High-Dimensional Data has been accepted on SBBD 2009 (The Brazilian Symposium on Databases). Here’s the abstract:
Searching by similarity is a critical operation on many systems, and thus has attracted the attention of many disciplines in Computer Sciences, including Computational Geometry, Machine Learning, Multimedia and, of course, Databases. To perform efficiently, similarity search requires the support of indexing, which suffers from the infamous “curse of the dimensionality”. In this tutorial we will introduce the challenges of indexing and searching high-dimensional data, and present the most recent tools available to “tame the curse”. At the end, the audience will have a good grasp of the current state of the art, the most promising research trends and the challenges still faced by the technology.
The tutorials, as I understand, are open to all participants on the conference. Mine will be held on Wednesday, October 7th from 14h40 to 18h20, with a 20′ coffee-break. If you use Google calendar, you can save the date by clicking on the button below.
* * *
I’ve unintentionally let an awful lot of of time pass since my last post — the move to Campinas (and to UNICAMP) has been wonderful, but also laborious. I thought that after moving across countries three times, moving across states would be a piece of cake, but it seems that, no matter the distance, moving is always a lot of hassle!
EDIT 11/11/09: The tutorial presentation, for the moment without narrative, is available on my talks and courses page.
Posted in career, publications | Tagged: indexing, kNN search, publication, SBBD, tutorial, UNICAMP | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Thursday, July 23, 2009
I am glad to announce that I’ve got a post-doctoral position at the Computing Institute of the State University of Campinas, where I’ll be supervised by Prof. Ricardo Torres.
Prof. Torres and I have met last December at Cergy Pontoise, France, on the occasion of his visit at the ETIS Labs and my research internship at the LIP6 Labs. We have quickly found common research interests and decided to submit a request for a post-doctoral scholarship to FAPESP, one of the biggest scientific sponsoring foundations in Brazil. We received the acceptance a few days ago.
During this new internship I will try to broaden some of the results of my thesis, and continue to work on scalability issues of Machine Learning and Information Retrieval. And I will continue to cooperate with my French colleagues (whom I am visiting on September, by the way ), and with my current team, at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
I am looking forward to start it !
Posted in career | Tagged: cooperation, FAPESP, post-doc, Ricardo Torres, UNICAMP, work | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Tuesday, June 2, 2009
In the last days I’ve been working round the clock — I’ve given my kNN search talk twice and several call-for-papers deadlines went by (or are coming), which meant that I was always in hurry for one reason or another.
This has been especially stressful, because for some time I had been getting everything done days ahead of the deadlines. But this month I went back to the classic regime of “crossing fingers and hitting the submit button at (literally) the last minute”.
As I move towards more complex research involving several labs, many students and audacious experimental designs I feel increasingly the need of using more formal management tools. But techniques created for Business (or even Engineering) do not seem to translate well to Academic research.
For example: I’ve tried to use Gantt charts in Microsoft Project to keep track of complex tasks and their dependencies. But I’ve found that as the work progresses, the list of tasks changes often and significantly, as some research directions reveal to be more fruitful than others. This ends up rendering the initial planning (and any chronogram based on it) useless.
Maybe is it the case of using an adapted “Spiral Model“, where risks are minimised from iteration to iteration, and creating detailed chronograms only for the lifetime of an iteration? Or are there specific management models for research projects? How the most efficient R&D labs manage their projects? How to adapt their experience to Brazilian public research?
Unfortunately, so far, I seem to have more questions than answers. I’ve bought this interesting book “Managing Science: Management for R&D Laboratories“, which is biased towards Particle Physics labs, but has (hopefully) useful concepts for all areas of experimental research and will help me to get an initial handle on the subject.
Posted in career | Tagged: academic world, career in science, cooperation, management of research, tech for scholars | 2 Comments »
Posted by eduardovalle on Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Prof. Arnaldo Araújo invited me for a 4-month research internship in the NPDI lab (which stands, in Portuguese, as an acronym for Digital Image Processing Centre).
I’ll be working in cooperation with his students to explore how aggregates of local descriptors, in the form of bags-of-features or visual dictionaries, can help in the classification of video and image databases.
NPDI is one the first labs in which I’ve worked and I am glad to have this opportunity to work with them again.
Posted in career | Tagged: Brazil, career in science, cbir, cooperation, DCC / UFMG, NPDI | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The lack of recent updates has been result of the end of my Research Internship in France, and all the consequent rush in tying up loose ends there, and setting up new projects here. All this international coming back and forth (how much luggage can one reasonably accumulate in four months?!) will end up killing me.
A good piece of news, though: I’ve passed my qualification for maître de conférences (which basically means that the French government considers me apt to be a teacher/researcher).
* * *
I was in Rio de Janeiro for the Carnaval, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet Dr. Eustáquio J. Reis from IPEA (the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economics Research), who is coordinating an interesting project to preserve and diffuse the Memory of Brazilian Statistics, using digitisation and the Web as the main tools.
Before I’ve got interested to the subject of high-dimensional indexing, the long term preservation of digital data (and its use to give access to cultural heritage assets) was my main research interest, as my M.Sc. dissertation reveals. So, it was with pleasure that I revisited the subject at an informal lunch, on the picturesque neighbourhood of Santa Tereza. We browsed important questions like file formats, standards for image acquisitions, search tools, the possibilities (and limitations) of character recognition, and the difficult balance between short term access and long term preservation every project has to achieve.
I am looking forward to see the new developments of this project, which concerns a type of cultural asset which is often overlooked, despite its enormous importance: quantitative data.
Posted in blogging, career, science | Tagged: back to work, Brazil, career in science, cultural heritage, digital preservation, France | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Friday, January 9, 2009
After the break, back-to-work under the snow in one of the harsher European winters seen of recent.
I am glad that I’ve got my seasonal flu before the break, since I have so much work to finish before coming back to Brazil in January 30. I intend to submit soon a journal article about multicurves (my high-dimensional indexing method based on space-filling curves), and I have some other results which I would like to submit to one of the conferences in the “first wave of deadlines” (ICDAR, January 22; ICIP, January 30; ACM KDD, February 2). And, of course, I have to accomplish my final role on the EROS 3D project, preparing the end-of-project report to be submitted later this semester.
Interestingly, an unusual lot of Brazilian colleagues have chosen to spend their Summer break in Europe (thus exchanging heat waves and tropical storms for snow and glacial winds), including two former teachers and two former classmates. This unusual density of temporary “exilés” has been fortunate, in the sense that it gives the opportunity of many encounters, discussions, and… future cooperation!
Posted in career | Tagged: back to work, Brazil, cooperation, France, multicurves | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Thursday, December 11, 2008
In France, public higher education has an interesting, but complex system of double-approving candidates for the positions of Maître de Conférences (roughly equivalent to Associate Professor) and Professeur des Universités (Full Professor).
First, you have to obtain a “seal of approval” from a national committee — this is called a “qualification”. The committee will check if your research / teaching / administrative experiences are compatible with your history, age and desired rank. Then, if you obtain the qualification, you can answer to job offers in the corresponding rank (when and if they are available) and a local committee (belonging to the concerned department / university) will evaluate the candidates.
The system is quite curious for foreigner eyes (even to me who have lived here for a few years). On one hand, it is as bureaucratic as it gets (bureaucracy streamlined by computers and the web, but still bureaucracy). On the other hand, it warrants a minimum capability level for all the candidates, precluding the very bad ones from securing a position just based on Cronyism. Of course, this system can’t prevent Cronyism from happening when sorting out the qualified candidates — but that’s another problem.
Another curiosity is that even if you are qualified by a committee in a certain domain of knowledge, for example, Computer Sciences, you are free to try job offerings on all other domains, for example, Mathematics (you are free to try, whether the local committee will choose you is another matter).
Once obtained, the qualification is valid for four years. Candidates can ask for a new one once the first expires, but they must convince the committee that their time was well spent.
Posted in career | Tagged: career in science, education, France, qualification | Leave a Comment »
Posted by eduardovalle on Thursday, June 12, 2008
I’ve passed the viva-voce defense of my Ph.D. thesis “Local-Descriptor Matching for Image Identification Systems”, thus completing the program.
I won’t pretend that it is not a relief to have survived the process, it certainly wasn’t easy!
But I have been lucky enough to work with a subject about which I am passionate, and with people who are amazing. So, even though I’ve got the much sought after title of “Dr.” I expect to keep on the same fruitful research track (subject, team) for a while.
The abstract of the thesis: “Image identification (or copy detection) consists in retrieving the original from which a query image possibly derives, as well as any related metadata, such as titles, authors, copyright information, etc. The task is challenging because of the variety of transformations that the original image may have suffered. Image identification systems based on local descriptors have shown excellent efficacy, but often suffer from efficiency issues, since hundreds, even thousands of descriptors, have to be matched in order to find a single image. The objective of our work is to provide fast methods for descriptor matching, by creating efficient ways to perform the k-nearest neighbours search in high-dimensional spaces. In this way, we can gain the advantages from the use of local descriptors, while minimising the efficiency issues. We propose three new methods for the k-nearest neighbours search: the 3-way trees — an improvement over the KD-trees using redundant, overlapping nodes; the projection KD-forests — a technique which uses multiple moderate dimensional KD-trees; and the multicurves, which is based on multiple moderate dimensional Hilbert space-filling curves. Those techniques try to reduce the amount of random access to the data, in order to be well adapted to the implementation in secondary memory.”
The full text, and other goodies, are available in my publications page.
Posted in career, publications, science | Tagged: defense, image identification, kNN search, publication, thesis, Université de Cergy-Pontoise | Leave a Comment »
