Georg Ruß' PhD Blog — R, clustering, regression, all on spatial data, hence it's:

Dezember 10th, 2008

Report of participation at SGAI 2008

From 10th to 11th of December, 2008, I participated in the Twenty-eighth SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. My talk was on the usage of self-organizing maps for data mining, using the agriculture data as a basis. I didn’t really get any important feedback right after my talk but I could talk to some of the academics who all said that my topic is very relevant and worth working on. Regarding my PhD, the main concern I’ll have to take into account is that it is not supposed to be a PhD in agriculture, but in computer science, so I can’t get away with just applying some data mining techniques to some agriculture data. But my ideas are still there and my thesis structure has also emerged.

For reference reasons, my slides for last week’s conference: slides-2008sgai.

Dezember 9th, 2008

Report from FAIRS’08

It’s been a long time since the last post. Same procedure as every year: once the winter term starts, the teaching stress starts again. About two weeks into the term I caught an RSI syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury) that prevented me from any typing, mousing and writing activities. It certainly feels better now, but I was given advice by three doctors to not overuse my hands any more, otherwise it would get worse than last time and surgery would be needed. I’m more or less confined to reading literature and taking some notes, as the pain usually returns after a short while of typing.

Nevertheless, I’m in Cambridge, England, at the moment. Yesterday I took part in the FAIRS’08 workshop, which was held at the same location as last year. There were about 20-25 PhD AI research students and seven to ten experienced (seasoned) experts for giving guidance along the PhD path. The best presentation was certainly given by Max Bramer, followed closely by Frans Coenen. Further scholars were Adrian Hopgood, Simon Thompson, Miltos Petridis, among others. Many thanks to Alice Kerly who perfectly organised the full forum day.

I gave my presentation on what I’m planning to do in my PhD, too. It raised some interdisciplinarity issues, i.e. I will have to take care that I’ll be doing a computer science PhD, not an agriculture PhD. At least my motivation was quite clear — I’m interested in my topic and it’s fun working on it. My slides are here:slides-2008fairs

Juni 10th, 2008

Paper draft for SGAI AI-2008

In this post I referred to an upcoming paper that we were preparing for submitting to the SGAI AI-2008. The paper is currently in the reviewing process. If you’re interested, the draft can be downloaded from our research group’s publication database. Feel free to read it and leave your comments in this blog.

Mai 28th, 2008

Matlab and colormap

For the SGAI-2008 conference paper it is required that the figures are in black-and-white. I can’t just convert the color figures into b/w because the color maps are wrecked and dark parts in SOMs that were clearly distinguishable before are the same shade of black after the conversion. The som_show function in the SOM toolbox has a colormap parameter. As it turned out, as usual, there’s just one more thing to do to generate the figures in a gray-scale colormap, using Matlab’s colormap function:

som_show(sM, [... more parameters ...],'colormap',colormap(gray))

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Mai 8th, 2008

Preparing another paper for SGAI AI-2008

I feel as if I had just returned from AI-2007 (at least the expenses were paid just recently by the University) and there’s the deadline approaching for AI-2008, again held at Peterhouse College, UK.
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