## Diffusion Curves

March 10, 2009

Stumbled upon an amazing SIGGRAPH paper on “Diffusion Curves: A Vector Representation for Smooth-Shaded Images”, at the Adobe ATL page : link. Given cartoon sketches represented as Bezier curves, with initial color values on either sides of the curves, they construct an image by letting the colors diffuse as governed by a Poisson equation. This can be used to rapidly create cartoon images and animations. The paper also solves the inverse problem, i.e. given an arbitrary smoothly shaded image, they determine the initial curves and color samples needed to vectorize the image.

Check out their cool demo here.

#### Diffusion Curves: A Vector Representation for Smooth-Shaded Images

Alexandrina Orzan, INRIA, Grenoble, France
Pascal Barla, INRIA, Grenoble, France
Joelle Thollot, INRIA, Grenoble, France

## Testing LaTeX support

June 11, 2008

Testing LaTeX support.

$f(X) = \sum_i w_i {\cal N}(X_i, \sigma I)$

## Accurate NCAA Picks

April 6, 2008

But three engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a computer ranking system, called LRMC, that consistently predicts NCAA basketball rankings more accurately than the AP poll of sportswriters and the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches, formulas (the Ratings Percentage Index), other computer models (the Massey ratings and the Sagarin ratings), and even the tournament seeds themselves.

After correctly picking all four of this year’s finalists, the LRMC method has now identified 30 of the last 36 Final Four participants (83 percent accuracy over the past nine years of NCAA tournaments) as one of the top two teams in their region. Over the same nine-year stretch, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23, and the RPI indentified 21.

LRMC (Logistic Regression Markov Chain) is a college basketball rankings system designed to use only basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage and the margin of victory. It was originally designed by Joel Sokol and Paul Kvam and has been maintained and improved by Sokol and George Nemhauser, all three optimization and statistics professors in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

GeorgiaTech News

Performance Comparison:
http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/people/faculty/Joel_Sokol/lrmc/lrmccomparison.pdf

Finally, refer the paper describing LRMC model.

## Generating IEEE Xplore compatible PDFs

March 29, 2008

Articles submitted to IEEE conferences will have to meet IEEE Xplore PDF requirements.  Most conference websites give free access to the PDF eXpress tool that can generate compatible PDFs from several source formats and validate PDF submissions as well.  However,  if you want to save time and generate such PDFs on Linux, here are the commands to use:

 rm -f *.blg *.aux *.log *.aux latex paper.tex rm -f paper.bbl bibtex paper latex paper.tex latex paper.tex dvips -Ppdf -tletter -G0 -D 600 -o paper.ps paper.dvi ps2pdf14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dUseFlateCompression=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress paper.ps

NOTE:  The template that your worked with, might not be compatible by itself. Avoiding  hyperref   package,  fixed annotation related issues that PDF eXpress was complaining about.

Use these commands to generate high quality PDF documents for publishing. Change the paper type in ‘dvips’ command to suit your specs.

## Organizing Information – wiki style

March 10, 2008

The principal attraction of wiki style web pages is that you can update while you browse, with out having to login into the server and update the code/HTML. I started hunting for one such wiki software to replace my home page. My criteria include that such a software should be easy to install, not require root or database access, written in PHP and is GPLed. I just found one : PmWiki from the comparisons page on Wikipedia. I did try couple of others before zeroing on pmwiki. For instance, installing twiki was very annoying. Though, pmwiki didn’t fare well on the Google trends, I was able to install it within 10 minutes in my /public_html/.. Such a pleasant experience, it was.

Their philosophy about doing things is very impressive. I recommend the following cool skins : NotSoSimple, NewsPaper, Rounded.