Pedestrian Remover on Discover Blog

"When it almost succeeds, it gives users a good laugh: a post-apocalyptic cityscape including disembodied feet, ownerless dogs, and floating umbrellas."

That's from the write up of the pedestrian remover created by computer science grad student Arturo Flores and computer science professor Serge Belongie here in computer science at UC San Diego.

Dancer Identification and Pedestrian Remover

Computer vision students at UC San Diego who took Serge Belongie's CSE 190-A class set up blogs to show off their final projects during the winter quarter...including a pedestrian remover and a dancer detector. (Dancer detector videos embedded above and below.)

The pedestrian remover project turned into a paper presented at IEEE International Workshop on Mobile Vision. The dancer detector project has cool movies: "Dancer Identification within Shot Boundaries". The final report for the dancer detector is here (PDF). The UC San Diego students who did the dancer detector work are: Kedar Reddy, Nevin Gaudreau and Nishanth Satyanarayana.

Embedded below is another one of the videos from the dancer identification project. Check out more videos, images and information on the dancer identification blog.

It takes a network to raise a graduate student

"As one of our students once put it, 'It takes a network to raise a graduate student,'" said computer science professor Garrison Cottrell.

This is a quote from the Calit2 update story on the UC San Diego Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center.

One of the students photographed for the story is computer science PhD student Jacob Whitehill, of "turn-your-face-into-a-remote-control" fame. See YouTube video below.

Remote Control Built into your Face

Remote control built into your face! Above is a 2008 video of a smile detector project from the UC San Diego MPLab. The project is referenced in a new Calit2 story about the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center here at UC San Diego.

Natural Reserve Videos from UC San Diego

I was poking around the UC San Diego Research Affairs site and stumbled on this collection of videos about various natural researves tied to UC San Diego. (The first video I clicked on required some buffering...but it was worth the wait...I learned about a protective seed pod that looks just like a "spiky loofah". The "spiky loofah" is from a plant called a "cucamonga manroot". The video is here: http://research.ucsd.edu/media/video/UCSDResearchVideo.aspx?v2Play=scripps_08.mov

Boris Babenko Bags Google Fellowship

Boris Babenko bagged the 2010 Google Fellowship in Computer Vision. Nice work!

Below is video from the 2009 Jacobs School of Rock concert at Porter's Pub here at UC San Diego. Babenko is performing at about the 18-second mark.

Smoke-Tracking Robots

Above and below are images from today's morning test of the smoke-tracking robots from the Bewley robotics lab in the MAE department here at the Jacobs School. This morning, the mechanical engineers tested their robots along with complex controls systems in a proof-of-concept systems integration test.

The student below is MAE Ph.D. student Nick Morozovsky, the lead student on this project.