Brando's Blog

I had my first real meeting with Dr. Dailey to talk about the research project that we're working on together. For those who don't know about this: I am collaborating with one of my favorite information technology professors to do a research project. The result of the project will be a paper that we will try to have published. The goal of the project is to implement a system of organizing images so that they can be browsed by context (I.E. A picture of a river and mountains will be shown with thumbnails of pictures of other rivers and pictures of other mountains so that the user can browse through similar pictures).

The really geeky side of this research lies in how the images similarities are determined. It is done though the comments that accompany the pictures. The way it is done is a little over my head but basically the component strings that make up the comment are charted in an n-dimensional space along with the string it is compared to, then the distance between the two vectors is the degree to which the images are similar. I don't expect anyone to understand that because I barely do!

My motivation for doing this research, aside from doing neat IT stuff with a professor that I like, is to be published. This is a major trump card when applying to graduate school. I am sure it will be a good experience for me, even if the research does to live up to our expections. It's an invaluable experience.

I get to learn cool stuff, too. Over break I learned MySQL which is a database language. I also configured a Linux server at Dad's house to run MySQL so that I could experiment with it. I am pretty good now and have implemented the use of my new databases in some PHP code that I worked on earlier. It's a very powerful tool. I have the opportunity to teach Dr. Dailey how to use MySQL as well as to work with the administrators here at SRU to get MySQL installed on the supercomputers here. Lots of fun. Bye all!

P.S. Pictures soon. Evan is already using the re-vamped server to put some pictures on his blog. I had better quick slacking, lol.