Denoising

Good morning. Similar to yesterday’s weather here in the Twin CIties of Minneapolis and St. Paul, our high temperature for the day is forecasted to be 90F. We are still in spring but it is starting to feel like summer.

Yesterday my wife and I were planning to walk for about ten miles. Due to the temperature and humidity we decided to cut it short to just five. Today we are just planning on five miles.

Today we will experiment with denoising images. This post is based on the contents of a section in the PluralSight course Building Image Processing Applications Using scikit-image by Janani Ravi. Continue reading “Denoising”

Corner Detection

It is a summer Saturday morning in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in Minnesota. The temperature will go up to 87F. Around 10:00 AM, before it gets too hot, my wife and I will go out for a leisure walk of 10 miles. Last night I had a hard time sleeping so hopefully the mild exercise will help this evening.

In this post we continue to watch the PluralSight course Building Image Processing Applications Using scikit-image by Janani Ravi. She uses a Jupyter notebook. In this post we will use VSCode with GitHub Copilot. I should disclose that I am a Microsoft employee and have been using VSCode for a few years. When possible I like to follow the KISS principle so I prefer to use the minimum number of IDEs that support all the programming languages I wish to use. Why complicate life using as many IDEs as one can find and never become proficient on all of them. Continue reading “Corner Detection”

Histogram of Oriented Gradients

This morning on LinkedIn, NEWSLETTER, Big Technology, A newsletter about Big Tech and society, by Alex Kantrowitz I listened to the podcast Let’s Talk About Temu and Shein, The Fast-Rising, China-Based Retailers Threatening U.S. Mainstays. 

On Big Technology Podcast, Ranjan Roy and Alex Kantrowitz spoke with New York Magazine contributing editor John Herrman about Temu and Shein, the fast-rising, China-based retailers that are threatening the U.S. mainstays including H&M and Amazon.

Continue reading “Histogram of Oriented Gradients”

Canny Edge Detector

Welcome to the last section of the first chapter on the PluralSight course Building Image Processing Applications Using scikit-image by Janani Ravi.

In this post we will deal with the Canny edge detector. It is a more complex edge detector that Roberts or Sobel. Continue reading “Canny Edge Detector”

Convex Hull

In this post we will learn a few things about a convex hull.

Before we get into the main subject I would like to chat for a few on a different subject. Currently I continue to read Natural Language Processing by Ekaterina Kockmar. Earlier this morning I was reading the section 3.2.2 Matching forms of the same word: Morphological processing. In the current chapter we are trying to develop an information retrieval system. In a nutshell we have a set of documents of interest and a set of queries. The idea is that given a query we want to return relevant documents in descending order. Sounds very much like what Google search does. Of course the objectives are not to write something to compete with searches on web browsers, but to give us an idea of the general steps needed to perform such a task.

In particular I was reading about Stemming. The idea is that when you have words in a query and wish to map them to words on a document, the forms of a word may be different. A simple word match would not work (e.g., continue and continuation) because for a computer the words are different. If we implement an algorithm using stemming we will be able to match the words.

As I was reading the section an old Spanish saying (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saying) “The devil knows more through being old than through being a  devil.” If you stop for a few and think about the Spanish saying you should reach the conclusion that it is wrong. In general if you do not reflect on what happened, the good and bad decisions you made, you will not learn and therefore you will not become wiser. For the Spanish saying to be true one must assume that the devil reflects on past events. Since the devil is a personification of evil and not a being like us, the saying is just a saying. Continue reading “Convex Hull”

OKRs for Personal Goals

I continue to read two or more chapters per day from “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr. I wish I could have enough time per day.

The book is oriented to achieving business goals using something called OKRs. They are something like KPIs but the difference is in how they are generated, published, maintained, and evaluated. Continue reading “OKRs for Personal Goals”

Measure What Matters by John Doerr

Good day! Hope you are doing well. This post does not cover a technical subject. If you follow my blog, you might have noticed that about one out of five books I purchase and read are not technical. I believe that success is based on both technical expertise and proper management.

A few decades ago I developed the software methodology which I named Cyclic Development Process (CDP for short). I applied it and tweaked it in order to simplify the development of custom and product systems. It worked very well for me. Continue reading “Measure What Matters by John Doerr”

Pause Giant AI Experiments – An Open Letter

This morning I watched a 30 minute presentation titled “Why the 6-month AI Pause is a Bad Idea. If interested watch the YouTube video to get an idea on the response by Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun. I have read a few articles on contributions from both of them to AI. As a matter of fact a few years back I took one or more courses taught by Andrew Ng.

This response is based on a request by hundreds titled: Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter. Among the petitioners you find Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Yoshua Bengio, just to mention a few. As I am writing this post, the count of signatures is up to 17821 to 17931 in less than an hour. Continue reading “Pause Giant AI Experiments – An Open Letter”

Split Text

Hope your day is going well. As you might know, I enjoy spending the mornings of Saturdays and Sundays reading and experimenting. To me that is the best way of learning. I use about eight hours per weekend to learn.

Earlier this year I purchased the book Getting Started with Natural Language Processing by Ekaterina Kockmar published by Manning. A few years back I took an on-line course on machine learning which touched on some of the topics also covered by this book. Continue reading “Split Text”

Days in Month – Java

In this post we will compute the number of hours in the specified month and year. This could be used to determine the cost for a feature if enabled every day for a specified month and year.

If one rounds up all months to have a fixed set of days, the result would not be correct. For example, a year has 12 months. Most months have a fixed set of days e.g., Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Aug, Oct, and Dec always have 31 days while Apr, Jun, Aug and Nov always have 30 days. This is not the case with Feb which on regular years it holds 28 days but on leap years it holds 29 days. Continue reading “Days in Month – Java”