My posts | Back in Canada

After visiting some falling water at/and CIVR 2008, I'm back in Canada for the next few weeks. A short summary so far.

Niagara Falls is, uhm, touristy. Really touristy. Which is too bad, because the falls themselves are quite breathtaking to see, for about five minutes. After that, people need to be entertained, which is the reason for the small Las Vegas like town around it I guess. Of course, being there we still took our time to do the touristy thing, followed by some wine-tasting in one of the local wineries. A good way to spend a day!

The day after that was CIVR 2008. A nice conference! Organizing and participating in the VideOlympics at CIVR 2008 this year was also absolute fun! It's very nice to see all those weird and sometimes extremely creative browsers together in one room, competing with each other so that everybody wins. :-)

The goal of the VideOlympics is simple. You get a dataset, typically 100 hours of video, and a topic, which can be something like "Find shots of monkeys". The goal of each participant is then to find these shots in the collection as fast as possible, the one who finds the most "wins". Though it must be said that winning in this sense is not important here, everybody wins. The results are shown on a large scoreboard in real-time. Mix this up with a large audience and you have a lot of (serious) fun.

This year a lot of participants brought some very creative browsers to the table. I've seen a lot of flashy smooth graphics! Also, quite a few systems were collaborative multi-user search systems, including one which used ipods. And there was even one system which used an ECG scanner to read the brainwaves of the user in order to skip that pesky 200 millisecond delay between you thinking "this is a good result" and your muscles actually firing to flip that button on a keyboard. Very creative!

After that I flew on to Comox to spend a month of semi-vacation. This is relaxing in itself, though I find it also to be difficult to be so far away sometimes. So what's next? In the last few days I've been finishing up a paper I'm working on. I'm finally beginning to feel quite happy with the end result. And now? Pictures of course. Also I've been planning on flexing some programming muscles in order to improve our search engine a bit, and after that. We'll see! :-)

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