Red is the New Black

For those of you that haven't forwarded it to us already, yes we know that that xkcd has conducted a color naming survey and has posted some analysis of their color survey results. Fun stuff, with interesting similarities (and differences) with some of the work we've done over the years relating to color naming. To maintain parity, we offer the following cartoon response to their survey.



And yes, the comic sans font was used purely for it's inflamtory powers.

Location, location, location

Today, many conglomerates are not run by visionaries but by gnomes toting spreadsheets. The key factor for success is then the objective function being optimized by the model. More often than not, the objective function is cost minimization.

Because there are still substantial salary differences around the world, but all scientists are equally dumb (otherwise they would all work in the financial industry), it boils down to location. You can convince yourself of this by driving around the research parks of the Silicon Valley: it looks more and more like Bodie, although some optimistic realtors still leave up the "for lease" signs. The research labs moved from Palo Alto to Beijing, and from there to the Amazon. Who knows where the objective function will send them next.

Unless, somebody uses a different objective function. On 30 April 2010, Disney opened a new research lab in the most expensive city in the world: Zürich in Switzerland, joining companies like IBM and Google, who also have research labs there. Obviously, they concluded that the best location is not the one with the lowest wages, but the one with the sharpest brains, all in a fertile eco-system.

The story began four years ago: Disney's new CEO Robert Iger and Edwin Catmull, chief of the Pixar animation studios that belong to Disney since early 2006, decided to perform more research in house. Through Joe Marks, ETH professor Markus Gross prepared the winning proposal for a joint venture between ETH and Disney.

Disney is paying the high Swiss salaries, while the ETH is contributing the infrastructure. This includes the building at Clausiusstrasse 47. The created intellectual property and their licensing fees will be shared between ETH and Disney. At the opening April 30, Disney Research Zurich started with 20 researchers, which will grow to 40 by 2011.

In the portrait above, Prof. Markus Gross is holding cheap 3-D goggles, but the agenda for Disney Research Zurich goes much further than that. For example, part of the eco-system in Zurich is a small company selling a mobile autosteroscopic video player the size of a paperback for just 400 francs. This video player presents 3-D movies without the spectator wearing special glasses.

Not far from Disney Research Zurich, near the city zoo, is FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, who is organizing the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa. Disney's ESPN sports channel has announced that is will broadcast the Johannesburg games in 3-D. This will bring big financial opportunities for owners of virtual sky boxes around the world.

One especially hard problem in presenting 3-D contents on a 2-D surface is vergence, and this is one of the areas being researched at the new laboratory, for now with Swiss cows:

Magnetic movie

Of course, we cannot see magnetic fields other than in the aurora borealis, that is why we have computer animation. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor are two masters in the use of computer animations for visualizing phenomena.

Objects Make Better Gifts

This weekend was Alternative Press Expo in San Francisco.



During a webcomics panel at least two of the panelists said one of the reasons they decided to try out publishing a webcomic was to be able to experiment with color in their comics.

Which is to say web color is still cheaper than printed color.

Colored geese

When I did my first steps in image processing, researching new algorithms was not for the faint of heart. First you had to be a maestro programmer (a.k.a. wizard) because to get the algorithm to run with a usable performance on a sub MHz processor with 64K bytes of memory you had to write a paging algorithm to fit it all in memory and code the inner loops in octal code so not to miss any clock cycles and work directly on the barrel shifter. You also had to stick an exception handler at the beginning of the boot loader to catch processor faults and get a chance at debugging your algorithm.

A first quantum leap happened when Photoshop came out, because you could first try out things interactively, then you could write a plug-in with your algorithm.

The next quantum leap happened with MatLab, which contains well programmed image processing libraries that allow you to quickly implement your algorithm expressing it as a linear algebra problem.

A new quantum leap is happening now with Mathematica, which now allows images as parameters, contains an image processing library, and gives you the full power of symbolic computing. Read more about it in this blog post by Theodore Gray. [Click the image to view the movie.]

Many thanks to Don O'Shea for the pointer.