Vision de San Diego

in lost English below

CIC se termine sur un rythme connu, éprouvant mais toujours réjouissant, discussions et présentations intéressantes entre autres à propos de display, l’arrivée d’outils d’optimisation, l’extension des CMFs [mes quelques notes sur la conférence CIC 2016 ici] et bien sûr la fatigue due à la distortion journalière du temps grace aux inévitables et indispensables bières d'après les sessions officielles.

16 ans après avoir suivi les élections américaines de Montréal - donc presque localement - je renouvelle l'expérience, cette fois ci de la Californie et dans le dernier fuseau horaire des résultats où l'issue fait peu de doutes. Chaque soirée à partir du mardi soir était animée de manifs anti nouveau président dans centre ville  de San Diego - où se déroule ma conférence couleur cette année - avec l'impression depuis de se réveiller chaque matin dans la mauvaise time line de Retour vers le Futur.

and now in lost English

CIC is getting over soon under its usual rhythm,  demanding but always gratifying, discussions and presentations were interesting on various topics such as display, new optimisation tools, the extension of CMFs [you can read here my few notes about the conference CIC 2016] and of course your body getting more tired every day because of the time distortion... time distortion mainly due to the inevitable and vital evening beer sessions after the official sessions.

16 years after having followed the US election from Montréal - so almost as a local - I renew the experience this time from California. The local time zone makes the doubts about the final results. Each evening from Tuesday demonstrations were happening in downtown San Diego - where my conference is taking place - with the sensitive impression to wake up each following morning in the wrong time line of Back to the Future.

Berlin Amsterdam New-York San-Diego

maybe in English below

Voyage un peu long mais ca va, de la place pour mes jambes donc je ne peux pas trop me plaindre et de plus tous mes avions ont réussi leur atterrissage. J'ai gagné pas mal de points sur Foursquare avec tous ces aéroports ainsi que quelques taches de sauce tomate sur mon t-shirt blanc... A retenir pour les futurs voyages: mettre un t-shirt noir et éviter les plats en sauce.

L'arrivée à San Diego ressemble à celle que j'ai eu à San Antonio ou Albuquerque. L'aéroport est vide, il fait chaud, il fait nuit, je ne sais plus dans quel fuseau horaire j'évolue. Mais rapidement je trouve mon bus, 2$ et 12min de trajet et j'arrive à mon hotel. Là je fais la connaissance de mon voisin de chambre, Alexandre prof brésilien comme moi venu écouter et aider sur place la conférence CIC. Il temps de s'effondrer, la session "short course" dont je suis un peu responsable débute dans 7h.

in live translated English

Journey a bit long but still ok, I had room to squeeze my legs so I can't really complain, besides my numerous airplanes did succeed in each of their landing.  I won a few points in Foursquare with all these airports as well as a few tomato sauce stains on my white shirt... Notes for the future trips: wear a black shirt and avoid pasta with tomato sauce.

The arrival in San Diego reminds me those I had in San Antonio or Albuquerque. The airport is empty, it's dark, it's warm, I don't know in which time zone i'm evolving. But quickly I find my bus, 2$m and 12min later I'm in my hotel. I meet my room neighbor for the time of the conference, Alexander a Brazilian professor coming like me to help and listen this week at CIC. It's about time to collapse, the session "Short Course" I'm involved in is starting in 7h.

Some data about a data conference

I had the chance to attend the Data Natives 2015 event last week in Berlin. A first time event having for topics FinTech, IoT and of course Big Data. I heard some interesting talks but also less interesting ones. You can still hear people having the dream of forecasting anything with the help of more data, but with often the feeling it's only in order to sale more stuffs. I haven't got the life improvement that suppose to go with Big Data (e.g. mass surveillance doesn't work obviously).

But here and there you can sometimes hear someone talking about a project that hold your attention. For me the most interesting aspect is the inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary aspect of the data. To achieve something relevant or meaningful with all the available information, you need to be able to define first what is the problem you are trying to solve (and yes I have a degree in opening open door).

Four presentations are still in my head, one using NLP to pre-sort a lot of CV (from HitFox during the first day of the program) and a second using computer vision to automatically give feedback on webpage design (from EyeQuant last talk of the second day). Actually for the last one their talk was much wider than this single problem.

About IoT and FinTech is wasn't really impressive. Actually the only striking aspect is that the same tools are used whatever is your field of work (like data science / analytic / finance): you accumulate data, you trying to find information and pattern into them, this in order to derive model to make prediction. And without surprises the most interesting talks about FinTech came from the people involved in the Bitcoin economy / technology (Blockchain and ascribe Gmbh). Maybe the banks have some cool stuffs to talk about, but they weren't really present.

Data conference coming!

I'm interested in knowing, observing how my field - applied research, technology, imaging, innovation... whatever you call it - is evolving. Working full time on one project is of course a good solution to see what's going on, but it's also taking the risk of being stock in daily routines. In that sens it's always wise to have a look of what your neighbors, competitors are doing, how they try to solve the same problem you are working on.

From my own experience I know that we - let's call us/me applied/data scientist - are very fast categorized in sub-fields, as experts and that it is sometimes difficult to extract yourself from the prism of how people are perceiving what you can do. Having said that, to be able to attend events, meet a new crowd, hopefully interesting people, exchange information, re-present yourself, feel how an industry is growing is something vital.

A few days ago I did spot an event Data Natives 2015 scheduled in Berlin the coming 19-20 of November. The keywords combination used to introduce the program is almost too perfect: IoT (internet of thing),  FinTech (Financial Technology and not tech from Finland which sounds pretty cool too) and Big Data of course. Needless to say that I'm pretty excited to attend this conference!

CIC visiting Darmstadt

What is CIC you may ask yourself? It's stand for Color Imaging Conference, a conference about color and imaging. This year it took place in Darmstadt DE. The last 22 editions always took place in the US, last year it was in Boston MA, two years ago in Albuquerque NM, three years ago in Los Angeles CA, four years ago in San Antonio TX and that's it for my involvement. Next stop is San Diego CA in November 2016.

I'm a regular attendee, I joined this community already ten years ago alternating between CGIV, AIC, EI and CIC. Depending of the event you will meet a slightly different crowd or so to say different crowds will meet allowing to go deeper in the various fields represented. But for sure it's about imaging, color, perception, printing, archiving, image acquisition, color management, camera and display calibration, gamut mapping and more.

This year almost 200 persons were attending the event in Darmstadt. There is a kind of routine in such event and being part of the committee allows you to see the people interaction with a special look. It's very special to see the attendees - former colleagues, friends, known members of this community - arriving from everywhere almost - from North America, Europe, Asia, Australia... - and being all jet-lagged. Even if you are traveling in the same time zone you will end up jet-lagged. First of all the schedule is tide and you have to use the "free" time to talk with everybody. Sharing a meal or a beer is usually very appropriate. As a result you barely have time to rest, but the kind of adrenaline you get from meeting the crème de la crème of the color scientists keeps you awake.

Another conference in Berlin about Culture and Informatic

A rather chaotic conference with a nice location, location being a room in the Bode museum in Berlin. Second edition for me and I still struggle to understand how this one works. I found each session too short regarding the number of presentation per session (without talking about the people reading their presentation) and the keynotes being too numerous in comparison.

But despite my negative first impression I found some interesting facts and problematic. One of them is the great diversity within museums depending of their location, be it in a province of China or in Namibia. The matter of getting visitors, making them to come and visit is extremely different.  Having something to present to the public is not enough depending of the geographical location together with the social environment.

Always cool to talk with people following a complete different path as yours. I started my journey in Paris, went to Montreal, back to Paris, Oslo and now Berlin and here I had very interesting conversation with Indian and African people, for one traveling East to West in the South hemisphere and the other North to South crossing several time the hemisphere. Complete different languages and geographical references, but we found ourselves on work topic and way of living, three different continents and none of us working and living in our country of origin for at least 10 years.

Archiving conference 2014 in Berlin

This week I had the pleasure to attend the Archiving conference (AC) 2014 in Berlin. The event was hosted at the kino Arsenal in Potsdamer Platz in one of the cinema room with extremely comfortable red seats. This conference belongs to a group of conferences run by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology. I usually attend the Color Imaging Conference (CIC) or the Electronic Imaging conference (EIC), both in the US, so when I saw that the AC was taking place this year in Berlin I jumped at the chance and joined the event.

Comparing to CIC the topics of AC are much more applied and not only dedicated to imaging problems. The variety of represented fields makes this event very interesting. Starting from archiving itself, we can understand it by all problems related to collect documents, from papers, books, audio files, video files, electronic documents for e-government, art collections, website, internet. Once the databases are built you have to think of how to access the documents knowing that the amount of information grows without stopping, having documents digitized do not mean they don't need to be processed anymore (e.g. how to save scanned pages of an old book with its hand-written annotations). In relation to the scanning task, the one day industrial exhibition gives us the possibility to see different book scanners with special features to be able to manipulate fragile documents.

A never ending challenge in this domain is the continuous evolution of technology. If the tasks remain identical - to archive documents whatever they are - the people in charge of these tasks - working in library, museum, archive department - have to save the documents and keep alive the technology to actually store these documents. Archives being public they have to be accessible to the public. This also asks the question of the founding, the responsible people have to continuously argue with politicians to keep their founding at a reasonable level.

To be give a very simple image, in the past all documents were saved on solid media (ie stone, paper, film...), something physical with a long life duration. Then the time is speeding up, we accumulate more and more information, we need more space to archive it and we need to reduce the physical size of the archiving media. Data centers full of servers are available but the life duration they proposed is not as long as the physical media: you enter the configuration where these centers are continuously copying and migrating information from server to server to be faster than the archiving media life, therefore our global archives are always moving: a global power outage could mean the end of our archives.

Archiving film documents
An important parameter is the constant evolution of technology. This is something the movie industry is facing also continuously. In a way the challenges of restoring and archiving very old film material are very similar to those faced by during a movie production when different sources (ie contents from different cameras, different softwares) have to be combined: there are different workflow that need to be merged in order to produce the final document/film. There are discussions that propose to use the DCP film distribution format to store new films and old films. One advantage it is understood by many people but it brings the matter of DRM in the document. One problem is the projection system and the encryption are linked (if I'm correct), what happend when the projectin technology changes? All these aspects were tackled in the opening keynote given by a fellow from Fraunhofer IIS.

Crowd sourcing and database browsing
Crowd sourcing was to me a very interesting topic. It did appear in oral presentations and in posters. I joined together the database browsing because I think these two points are related. The amount of available information - as I mentioned above - is increasing and if you remember big data we have both feet inside. To process the documents the archiving departments have (eg in the conference program from the BNF in Paris, in the Netherland or in Germany) started campaigns where they ask the public to achieve tasks to validate digitization (I'm simplifying the problem here) where the task can't be perform fully automatically without errors. It follows the web 2.0 model where the user is also the one creating the content, except here he is helping/working on archive media which concerns everybody, it's our memory after all.

Graph database was mentioned and I could like to hear more about it. Especially how database query languages are developed to ease the access to the information in those databases. But this also implies to think how to build these databases. Pretty interesting in any cases.

First impressions
To be short there were mostly good. Different people, different backgrounds but similar challenges as archiving, digital preservation, curation are. Multidisciplinary as I like it.

Color Imaging Conference, first day and Short Course day

It is the third time that I'm able to join the Color Imaging Conference (CIC) after Los Angeles, CA last year and San Antonio, TX in 2010. This time I attend it without article, the one we submitted wasn't exactly finished and did not deserve to be accepted. It is always good to have your paper rejected from a good conference, it only pushes you to improve your work and you end up publishing later a better article. And enough of stating the obvious.

So this time I joined the conference as co-chair on the short course program, or short course session, I never know... Anyway this conference day offers - not for free - a panel of courses given by experts from academia or industry. As co-chair we had, based on last year program, to propose new courses and select submitted courses, they should reflect the latest development in a field and/or give an overview of a given topic (such as multi-spectral imaging or gamut mapping). Interesting and important to me, the courses are also showing connections between research and industry, basic and applied research.

I had the chance to attend three courses: "Normal and Defective Color Vision: from Theory to Simulation" given by Caterina Ripamonti from UCL Institute of Ophtalmology, "Color Grading and Color Management for Motion Pictures" given by Stefan Luka from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Peter Postma from FilmLight and "What Color is 3D?" given by Matt Cowan from RealD.

The first course was very interesting, because before going to the point of simulating how people with defective color vision see color, state of the art was presented. But more important it shows how color and vision are treated depending of your field of study or depending of your application and which assumptions you are stating to build up your theories and explanations (e.g. which functions are used to approximate how a signal is captured by the eye). We are the border of physiology and computer color science.

The two other courses were related. And the instructors from the color management for motion picture joined the color and 3D lecture after giving their lecture, which ends up with an interesting discussion. A nice aspect of color science in the field of motion picture is the very applied nature of it: how do you capture light, how to process it, how to you compose, create with the various available tools and how do you reproduce and display your work.

And I end up having diner with "la crème de la crème" of color scientists based in UK, Australia, Spain and Germany. Fun fact, none of us four are working in our respective country (whatever it means). As usual, the minimum number of language talked per person was 2.4 . Take that narrow minded and obsessed with boundaries people.