I saw 11 replies to a Slack thread of a research project and thought “whoa what a lively academic research discussion” and then came in to find out it was all about gift card amount for user study participants.
=D
2022-02-23
Lively academic thread
2022-01-24
Lip sync a pre-recorded video for live presentation
In a recent research talk to about 100 people, the host suggested me to pre-upload any video files into the conferencing system to minimize network disruptions during live presentation.
Since my slides contain a lot of videos with a mix of online and local files, it would be infeasible to pre-upload them and then scramble to pick them on the fly.
Thus, I pre-recorded my entire presentation during a practice session, uploaded the recorded video, and played it during the meeting with my camera on and lip sync.
Panopto capture seems to work well for presenting from a Chrome tab (with Google slides).
2022-01-11
Pre-recorded video presentation
CHI 2022 provides this medium post about giving a remote presentation as well as different styles ranging from very simple to quite fancy:
- Slides with talking head
- Slides and voice over only
- Slides in a news like bubble
- Slides with a lot of post production
- Slides on VR presented in VR
Feel free to pick a style you like.
I would do voice over only as I try not to let people know what I look like, or even sound like via synthetic voice over.
But if you like people to know you and/or have the talk video better approximate an in-person conference presentation, consider showing your face.
2021-12-15
2021-12-14
How to draw a f****** owl
This LinkedIn post reminded me of the talk I gave in SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 about how to make a SIGGRAPH paper.
That owl image came from here, resonating with my earlier phase of learning how to draw around that time, in addition for being a funny point of analogy for writing research papers.
Retrospect can sometimes feel like a time travel to reconnect with my past self.
My passion for SIGGRAPH peaked around 2011 to 2014, and I have been looking beyond that for interesting or important problems to work on.
2021-11-15
Follow your passion only if you know what it is
I have been using ray tracing as a default introductory exercise for my open mentor program. Probably as a consequence, several recent students decided to focus on rendering when applying for graduate research programs.
When I applied for grad schools 20+ years ago, I only knew that I wanted to program stuff.
I decided to focus on computer graphics after the first year during which I took courses in different topics and attended different research group meetings (not least for the free food).
I figured out my research topic after the third year, after trying out at least 20 different projects which not only greatly helped me figure out my thesis topic but also have a glimpse of what is going on in other potentially related research fields (which in turn helped me expand and transition my research topics many years later).
I guess this relates to the more general discussion about the danger of following your passion (too early); if you only do what you like, you might not try what you might like even more.
2021-11-13
SIGGRAPH/ToG conference/journal papers
When I was a PhD student around the turn of the millennium, SIGGRAPH, despite being the top venue in visual computing, is considered as a conference and thus the published technical papers received a lower count/weight than journal papers in traditional academic rating.
To remedy this problem, starting from 2002 SIGGRAPH technical papers were published as special issues of ToG (ACM Transactions on Graphics), which is a journal.
Now, about 20 years later, people were concerned about the author workload and review speed for ToG, compared to some machine learning and computer vision conferences which tend to have lower requirement for evaluation and faster review/publication cycles.
To remedy this problem, starting from 2022 SIGGRAPH will start accepting a conference-track of papers.
This is one example of the general phenomena where people repeat cycles of identifying problems, devising solutions, causing other (sometimes previous) problems, ad infinitum.
Update: Aaron Hertzmann (the main architect for the conference track) has a recent post about expectation creep that is worth taking a look.
2021-11-11
Award nomination
A few years back, someone asked me to nominate him/her for the SIGGRAPH significant new researcher award. At that time I found the conduct questionable, so I consulted with my PhD adviser, who told me that I should not incur any potential benefits or conflict-of-interests from the nomination. For example, an advisee receiving an award could potentially enhance the reputation of the adviser. A corollary is that the nomination should be anonymous, for which the nominee shouldn’t even be aware of being nominated (not to mention soliciting) as otherwise it is a form of doing favor.
In the end, I still did the nomination due to institutional pressure, but in retrospect I found the entire experience lame, and that person did not win the award anyway.
Today another individual asked me to nominate him/her for a research award, with whom I shared the above story.
I believe someone who deserves an award would not care about it.
I am not following baseball, but the most memorable event in MLB is when Ichiro Suzuki turned down a prestigious award, multiple times.
Research is a fun job if you can handle it
After a company training today a fellow employee from another division pinged me: Are you in the research group? That sounds fun!
Me: Research is a fun job as long as you are comfortable failing 90% of the time. 🙂