Nuit Blanche's Month in Review (October 2012)

In order to provide some focus to the blog, I have started these Month In Review posts. This is the second installment, the first one is here. We'll see where that experiment might take us. Talking about experiments, we also started something on Reddit and the Sunday Morning Insights. For more on those, please see below. Here is how this post is broken down:

• General ideas
• Reproducible Research - Codes -
• Jobs
• Experiments: Month in Review / Reddit / Sunday Morning Insights
• Life of the community / The Business of Science 
• Misc

General ideas

This past month saw the crossing of the one million five hundred thousand pages views. What does this mean in terms of reach out, check this entry out for more information.

If there is one lesson from this long list of preprints and papers showing up on What's New in Compressive Sensing and Matrix Factorization This Month, it's that ADMM is becoming a mainstay in reconstruction solvers. 

I don't know if this is a trend, but this October, we also saw an interest by the practitioners to develop domain specific dictionaries:

• Accelerated DSI with Compressed Sensing using Adaptive Dictionaries 
• Lipid Suppression in CSI with Spatial Priors and Highly Undersampled Peripheral K-Space 
• Super-resolution using Sparse Representations over Learned Dictionaries: Reconstruction of Brain Structure using Electron Microscopy 

We'll see where that leads us especially in light of advances in our understanding of the analysis framework (see Analysis K-SVD: A Dictionary-Learning Algorithm for the Analysis Sparse Model , Sunday Morning Insight: The Linear Boltzmann Equation and Co-Sparsity for more)

I was also particularly impressed by muon tomography this past month and wrote twice about it (Imaging Damaged Reactors and Volcanoes, Muon Tomography as a Moore's Law Enabled Technology ) mostly because better algorithm and silicon speed provide for a better image of what's around us.

I also came back to a very interesting paper in Pushing the Boundaries in Compressive Sensing ( and a connection with this video) and noted the push toward unifying Group testing and compressive sensing (Semi-Quantitative Group Testing: a General Paradigm with Applications in Genotyping), a subject of paramount importance in the future. We also had some crazy ideas ( Imaging with a View or Imagine a GoPro2 at Supersonic speed ). There is still time for your students ( if you are US based) to get on HASP. What about getting a camera to fall at Mach 1 and take a movie that parallels that of Curiosity landing on Mars ?

Other entries and papers of interest included a paper somehow connected to Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (Invariance of Principal Components under Low-Dimensional Random Projection of the Data ), the use of adaptive compressive sensing from actual experimental data (A Data-Adaptive Compressed Sensing Approach to Polarimetric SAR Tomography of Forested Areas) and the limits of super resolution (Quantum limits of super-resolution of optical sparse objects via sparsity constraint ).

Reproducible Research - Codes -

In the spirit of reproducible research, we also had a flurry of new implementations / codes made available by their authors

• Analysis K-SVD: A Dictionary-Learning Algorithm for the Analysis Sparse Model , 
• Unbiased Risk Estimates for Singular Value Thresholding and Spectral Estimators 
• GONDOLA: Generative-Discriminative Basis Learning for Medical Imaging 
• Eulerian Video Magnification for Revealing Subtle Changes in the World 
• MASTeR: Motion-Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Regularization for Accelerated Dynamic MRI 
• Complex Matrix Factorization Toolbox 
• Lipid Suppression in CSI with Spatial Priors and Highly Undersampled Peripheral K-Space 
• nGpFBMP: A Fast Non-Gaussian Bayesian Matching Pursuit Method for Sparse Reconstruction 
• Accelerated DSI with Compressed Sensing using Adaptive Dictionaries 
• SCoBeP: Dense Image Registration using Sparse Coding and Belief Propagation 

Jobs

We also had a large set of job announcements:

• Three PostDocs at the Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and Modelling (UBC)
• Postdoc Positions, Graph Analysis or Compressed Sensing, Sandia, CA
• Five EECS positions at the Colorado School of Mines
• a Postdoc Position in Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra @ IBM
• Postdoctoral Researcher position at the Linnaeus Centre ACCESS
• Two Post-Docs Statistical Physics Approach to Reconstruction in Compressed Sensing at ESPCI in Paris
• Two jobs for students

Experiments: Month in Review / Reddit / Sunday Morning Insights

The first installment for the Month in Review (September 2012) is here.

At the beginning of this month, we started an experiment on Reddit, so far we have 42 readers. This is good. I have mentioned this before but anybody can post a link there as long as it is somehow relevant to the subject at hand. Also, civil discussions are encouraged. 

• Join our Reddit Experiment, Join the CompressiveSensing subreddit and post there !
• Bursting the Filter of our Peers: A Reddit Experiment

While this experiment might be a good thing in terms of bursting our peer filter, I also like the fact that several entries are getting a new life. Since the Blogger search engine is pretty calamitous, this is a way to get attention on a subject that is not necessarily old but cannot be easily found with the blogger layout. We'll see how this goes. 

Sunday Morning Insight's goal is to provide some , you guessed it, insight on a subject you might have read several times on the blog, here are the first three installments:

• Sunday Morning Insight: Muon Tomography as a Moore's Law Enabled Technology
• Sunday Morning Insight: Ditching L_1
• Sunday Morning Insight: The Linear Boltzmann Equation and Co-Sparsity

Videos and Slides:

This past month, Nuit Blanche also featured a few videos and slides from conferences, I realize this is a time sink but it is worth it:

• Videos: Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Datasets
• Video: David Brady, Coded Aperture X-Ray Scatter Imaging
• Occam's razor in massive data acquisition: a statistical physics approach
• Slides: Workshop on "Randomized Numerical Linear Algebra (RandNLA): Theory and Practice"

Life of the community / The Business of Science (meetings/ talks / deadlines....)

• Seeking four new members for the international SPARS Steering Committee

• Meeting: Sparse Representations, Compressed Sensing and Applications
• SPARS 2013 Signal Processing with Adaptive Sparse Structured Representations.
• Abstract submission deadline for BASP workshop extended until 26 October
• Around the Blogs in 80 Summer Hours
• Around the blogs in 80 summer hours
• Random Bits: A course, a talk 
• two talks.
• Open Access and Post Publication Peer Review

Misc

• Ceci n'est pas le blog de Nuit Blanche

Credit: NASA/GOES, NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured this visible image of the massive Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 28 at 1302 UTC (9:02 a.m. EDT) (via Space.com)



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