Confessions of a researchaholic

August 28, 2017

git obliterate

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 11:17 am
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At the end of trying out BFG to purge a large compiled file from a repo, the following message was displayed:
😀


You can rewrite history in Git – don’t let Trump do it for real!
Trump’s administration has lied consistently, to make people give up on ever
being told the truth. Don’t give up: https://github.com/bkeepers/stop-trump

So with git, one no longer needs to be a rhetor to change the past.

August 23, 2017

Revision control based on lines vs operations

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:52 am
Tags:

I cannot believe I have not (really) noticed this earlier, but the current git/svn revision controls are based on simple line differences, without taking into account the actual editing operations which we actually did in SIGGRAPH 2011 for image editing.

As a very simple example, say a file contains an original line like this:

I love you. Do you love me?

User 1 breaks the line into two:

I love you.
Do you love me?

User 2 adds one word the line:

I love you. Do you love me too?

A revision control tool that considers editing operations can automatically merge the two edits:

I love you.
Do you love me too?

While the current svn/git tools, based on line differences, will simply give up and ask users for manual intervention.

August 22, 2017

ACM author rights

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:09 am
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Among the 3 options for your glorious SIGGRAPH (or other ACM) paper, I usually choose the new licensing agreement (option 2) because it does not require shelling out a few grands for retaining all rights (option 3) and allows the authors to retain the theoretical copyright unlike the traditional copyright transfer (option 1).

By theoretical, I meant that options 1 and 2 probably make little to no practical differences for authors, since the license transfer is perpetual and exclusive for ACM, and authors can share their preprints anyway.

August 16, 2017

Publishing two papers out of one submission

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 12:09 pm
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Co-authors and I submitted a paper with two main parts to X, a top venue in our field.
The reviews said the first part is good contribution but the second part is basically nothing, and rejected our paper.

We then revised the paper and submitted to Y, another top venue in our field.
The reviews said the exact opposite from X, but accepted our paper conditional upon the removal the first part.

So we split the paper, with the second part to Y and the first part to (the next round of) X.

😀

August 15, 2017

Napoleon height

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 2:49 pm
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Napolean Bonaparte is said to be short.
I did not realize that he is about my height until today.
😀

August 11, 2017

How to defeat an ideology

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 3:07 pm
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The more we avoid or suppress an idea, the more powerful it becomes.

“The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.” – What you can’t say by Paul Graham.

Engage and attack: attend-listen-embarass, rebut

Servers down

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 10:45 am
Tags:

Hmm do people start to submit so early for the next SIGGRAPH?
😀

Server is unavailable

Please try back later…

The SIGGRAPH server is experiencing very heavy traffic right now, and cannot service your request. Please contact sis_support@siggraph.org if you need immediate assistance. Otherwise, please try your request again shortly. Thank you.

[Later] And this:
http://dl.acm.org/errorpgs/503.html

August 10, 2017

Leaving Hong Kong

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 3:32 pm
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[Time for me to write this after the course/RPG requests start to flood in prior to the beginning of the next semester.]

I am joining Adobe Research in the bay area to increase the practical impacts of my research and reduce the excessive jet-lags I have to deal with.
This move is purely due to personal/geographical reasons; I love living in Hong Kong and being a professor.

I will remain affiliated with HKU for a while, without taking new PhD/MS/MPhil candidates or teaching classes. I will continue to help students through my open mentor program and internships with Adobe Research. Past course information is available under my homepage.

I would like to thank my family, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and students who have given me such a wonderful experience in Hong Kong. I will continue to explore this interesting world.

Hug <3

Specific thanks to:

Baining, Danny, Greg, Julie, and Marc for references;

Doug for all the advice and the book “a primer for university presidents”;

BH and dad for motivating and encouraging me to explore outside the bubble;

Pedro for relaying my application from HKUST to HKU, and sharing his restaurant list which I shamelessly borrowed for hosting guests;

Wenping and Yizhou for a vibrant graphics group;

CK and TT for advices on funding, service, and management;
Tomas, my last MSR intern, for joining me in Hong Kong;

Jun, my first official (no-shadow) student, for outstanding performance;
Qi, for bringing me into VR/display/perception research;
Mamba, my last HKU PhD student – I will do my best to help you succeed like your predecessors;

All my collaborators for the chance of learning from you and working on so many exciting projects;

DRPC members, especially Reynold, for all the fun in RPG recruiting;

DCDC members for their confidence in letting me teach 3 crucial courses: introductory programming, mobile computing, and machine learning;
Jolly for being the master TA for several classes;
HF for always kindly scheduling my classes in the afternoons;
KP for valuable experiences in teaching C1117;
Jack for leaving me C3314, which expelled teachers like the “defense against the dark arts” class in Hogwarts;
😎

The general and technical office staff, especially Wandy, Priscilla, and Olive for all the paper works and Maria for dealing with my always incorrect/incomplete/delayed expense/trip/grant reports;

Francis, you still owe me a lesson in Cantonese foul words.
>:D

August 3, 2017

LAX

Filed under: Real — liyiwei @ 8:45 pm
Tags:

My flight was delayed in the airport, which was too noisy and disturbing for me to focus on reading or coding. So I figured the best thing to do is to draw what I saw around me. This is my first attempt to capture either people or moving objects.

I am comfortable with digital pen sketching on a Microsoft surface pro, even though MS Word started to crash once I added enough strokes.

I drew the left/right side of the canvas with my left/right hand to minimize occlusion.

Download (DOCX, 1.08MB)

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