What's for dinner?

beep beep! hello! hope u're doing well..im alright, getting busy with daily schedule. today's been a productive day, been really occupied..started early in the morning with slides preparation for the atc course i'm currently taking, got carried away up till noon that i actually forgot lunch! went for a talk by a labmate and rushed for the atc class for a poster presention..by the way, it was kinda fun..we exchanged loadza information and learned a bit abt the classmates work/research..it's until 4pm that i realized that i've not eaten, thank god the potato salad i brought were enuff to keep my tummy fr making noise...heeehee..

i went back at 6pm, rest a little and started to feel hungry..and i thought it would be a good idea to start cooking, but didnt want to spend too long in the kitchen..then i decided to make something simple of quick preparation, the lasagna. yummy..this is my 2nd attempt after a 1st sometime last week..though i thought the 1st was better(it's unfortunate that i forgot to snap photos!), this one isn't bad, but i leave it to u to judge and thought of sharing, so here's a portion for u.. :)

ATC - Blog 3

I’m currently reading a paper publication related to the work that I’m doing. It’s a publication that I will most probably refer to a couple of times in this research, mainly because of the various possibilities of future works stated in their study. The title is called ‘Constraints on representational change : Evidence from children’s drawing’. I find this publication really interesting, in many ways. First of all, the title itself kinda explains the content of the paper. Secondly, simple English is used to convey the idea and what’s most interesting is that despite the complex ideas and discussions are made, there is a good flow of presentation where useful diagrams are depicted along with the given explanation.

The introduction starts with asking and answering why children’s drawing is found feasible for the study. There’s also a good list of literature review covered in the first part of the paper. The author makes the explanation clear by giving the underlying theoretical concepts relevant to the study before detailed descriptions are discussed , this includes an overview of the participants (which are of course children), the methods of experiment employed(children are asked to draw diagrams with many cycles of different types of changes made to the diagram; it’s interesting to look at the drawings the children produce such as a house with wings and a helicopter with legs!), results of the tasks performed and a comprehensive discussion on the findings are made with comparison of arguments from their work and previous researches . Examples or analogy are also widely used in order to make the context easy to comprehend.

It’s interesting that although this paper was published in 1989, the ideas and concept coordinates with my current research. During the time of writing, they did not mention anything about chunking. Probably because the theory of chunking wasn’t quite established at that time. However, their findings clearly focus on issues related to this particular subject. Somehow I’m amazed by the conjunction between my research and theirs which was done almost 20 years ago! It’s great to ponder abt how magnificent research evolves over time. Given the same information, probably I’d represent the findings in a more visually appealing approach, perhaps with the use of posters or power point slides. I believe this paper comes from a journal, therefore if I were to produce other publication for this, I see that the original publication can be divided into a few papers that could discuss on various aspects of the findings. Hehee..this has given me a motivation to start writing a publication of my own for this DPhil research..I’m motivated!

ATC - Blog 2

Today, I’m giving my views on the conferences related to my field. I received an email from my supervisor earlier on stating that it might be worth considering this conference for publication sometime next year. Believe it or not, I was actually really excited to get my hands on writing so that I’ve a chance to submit them this year, but then, I guess it’s a little too ambitious as I currently don’t have anything to report! Geez.. :p ok, I’m still at the early stage of research, this is coz I started my DPhil program sometime early this year. It’s fair that I’m not getting much from the previous 2 months since I’ve started. Nevermind, aim for next year! Yes, I will. Furthermore, the venue is in Frace..uh! The place I’ve been wanting to visit all my life! Hehee.. Anyway, so..this conference is named ‘Fifth Eurographics Workshop on Sketch-Based Interfaces and Modeling’, which will take place in Annecy, France from July 11-13, 2008. Basically, the topics covered in conference are mostly related to diagrams.

The workshop gives focus on digital technology of pen-based computer hardware and digital sketched-based interfaces. Issues such as interface design, algorithms, models and technologies will be discussed. Among the categories are new techniques for classification and recognition of hand-drawn shapes; applications of sketch-based interfaces in various domains such as CAD, animation, 3D computer graphics and many more; and empirical studies for clarifying nature of sketch-based interfaces with comparison to other techniques. The latter is most related to my research.

Findings of these researches are essential to further understand the concepts of human perception, shape recognition and geometric modeling techniques. As the technology improves, the use of pen and paper are becoming less important. I see that there will be a constant migration to the use of drawing computer hardware such as graphical tablets. This isn’t only restricted to computer related tasks but also diverse fields such as architecture design, engineering, arts, games and animation. Therefore, I feel that researches related to diagrams are worth to put effort on in order to find out the advantage and disadvantages of these possibilities so as to improve our lives.

Let's draw

Today, I had the opportunity to play around with the device that I'll soon use a lot. It's something called graphical tablet. Pretty cool to play with. It's like those tablet pcs, where u've to use stylus to write on it, but nothing really appears on top of the tablet. Instead, the output will be shown on the monitor's screen. Been testing around with it and this is what I came out with..bear with me, I'm never good with drawings!

and here's a serious one, the actual research work...

Overwhelming news!

Howdy! Good news..good news...im just overwhelmed with a news I received a couple of minutes ago..I still cant believe it myself! wow..it's a miracle..I recently got a paper publication presented by a representative to a conference in Japan..Through the feedback, it was unlikely that attendees were even interested in what the paper was all about..and it was presented by a lecturer from my department back in UM..and the news I received fr the lecturer just now, Dr Woo..made me jumped! The paper was awarded the Best Paper Award 2008..it's always a dream to get my very own publication awarded as the best paper, and it is finally answered..thank you god..I personally didn't feel it is the best of all the previous publications..i actually thought it's the worse as the paper was written due to short notice before the dateline..wow..i consider this as luck.. Anyhow, thank you Dr Woo for presenting the paper on my behalf and thank you committee for the honour..cheerios! =)

ATC - Blog1

Today, I’ll talk a bit abt my research (previous and current). During masters, I was working on a subject area called image processing. Right now, I’m doing something completely different tho it’s also under the same umbrella of Artificial Intelligence. It’s an area called Cognitive Science, a topic i’ve been wanting to learn and perform research since I learn them during my undergrad years.

The cognitive science area has been vastly studied since possibly in the 50’s and what’s interesting is, it’s an area that’s applied to various fields that makes it an interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. The idea of cognitive science began with development of theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. My research, somewhat, is an extension of this particular study. To put in simple terms, my work is about understanding how people learn diagrams. I work in the Representation and Cognition Lab of the Dept of Informatics. There are a few other postgrad students who are also doing research related to diagrams, but each person has a different focus and interest. In relation to diagrams, they work on maps, mathematical/physics diagrams, specific computer notation diagrams, conceptual theories and many more. Although these colleagues of mine work individually, we often have discussion to brain storm ideas and help others by providing feedback to our progress. I find this very helpful as I tend to think outside the box and gain more knowledge from these intellectual discussions.

Apart from informal discussions, there’s a weekly group meeting. Supervisors will also attend the meeting. During this meeting, we will either discuss the problems one has with their research or listen to talk given by the group members. Before I joined, the group meeting used to be a session where everyone would read a paper publication and discuss their understanding on it with others. This group are also active in submitting papers for publications, either conference or journals. As I understood with my previous experiences writing publications, the process that applies to cognitive science conferences and journals are somewhat similar. Basically, there will be an abstract submission. On acceptance, a full paper must be submitted and the conference follows. In some conferences, the abstract submission isn’t required, instead acceptance is made solely with reviews of the full paper. It’s also best to submit a publication to the most related conference to the work one is doing, this would give a higher weighting to the value of paper submitted. I haven’t actually gone through any potential conference and journals, but I will find out more in the coming entry..until now..tata!

Making friends

hello february! time flies..can't believe that i've already been here for a month..and with time, i learn, i understand and i adapt to situations better than before. I'm getting used to the environment i'm living here. Quite a number of ppl from home and here are concern abt how i'm coping with life..how nice of them, thank you for your concern..Honestly, i'm doing alright..I'm getting busy with courses, classes, workshops, discussions, daily chores..an endless list of things that occupies my everyday life. :)

today, i had the chance to meet a couple of new friends and new people...earlier in the morning, i decided to go to the town, got on the bus and on the way, a couple hopped in and one of them sat in front of me..we chatted and i was glad to find that they're from the indonesia, a country within the southeast asia region..somehow, i felt 'close' knowing these ppl as i could speak to them with my mother tongue, though it differs slightly with theirs. as the bus got us to our destinations, we exchange contacts and said our goobyes...it feels good to have new friends.

later at nite, i attended a friend's(whom i jz got to know during the recent wall climbing activity) dinner at her place in hove..tho it took me a while looking for the right flat within the house, i managed to find my way in after 20mins searching for the right flat number! The concept is, a house consist of a few rooms(called flats) complete with its own living room, kitchen, bathroom (like an apartment, really), and in front of it's door are a couple of doorbells for each flat..becoz it was at nite, i couldnt manage to find the right bell to my friend's coz there were only 7 bells but 9 flats, it also didnt ring the bell in my head to think that flat num 3 is actually the first bell..hence, made me walking around the house as if im a mak-guard! geez..and while i was finding my way, an elderly couple (they're perhaps in their 70s) passed by..it's really nice of them to 'help' me look for the right flat and later borrowed their mobile(thanks for mine being out of credit!) for me to call my friend after the attempt failed..hmmph, helpless me..anyway, yeah..i finally go in later after that..so glad that i did! there were already a couple of familiar ppl fr my lab and we chatted while waiting for the dinner. it surprises me that these peeps are into various activities in spite of being serious in the lab. the dinner was wonderful and thanks Beate for preparing the vegetarian dishes for me. :)

i made my way home after dinner and was surprised to find that another new friend whom i chatted a bit during one of my classes sat in front of me in the train. It's also a coincidence that both of us are living in the same building.

i felt tired as the day ended, but i'm happy to start having friends in this wonderful multicultural place.. ;)