In computer science it is common to measure algorithms performance by using O notation. Every book on algorithms development will start from this topic and although it is still good rule of thumb, the practical value of O-notation now becoming obsolete.

For example Mathworks dropped Flops since version 6, the command which was a good indicator of number of floating points operations in second. For another example see Is multiplication slower then addition, where Prof Daniel Lemire after perfoming basic tests concludes that "Hence, simple computational cost models (such as counting the number of multiplications) may not hold on modern superscalar processors."

During my PhD thesis development, I compared different version Particle filter - stochastic algorithm, which performance depends on number of particles used with Hough Transform based algorithms, which performance depends on a size of the grid in accumulator. In this post, I will show how Pareto optimal points can be used as good visualisation techniques for algorithms comparison.

View image
Any improvements?
Detection errors
-----------------------------
 
PF      = 0
RBPF    = 0
 
 
Execution time  (seconds)
-------------------------
 
PF      = 6.4465
RBPF    = 11.6923

Two of the brightest fellows, Dr Evan Hughes  and Dr David Salmond (DSTL), who were my  examiners, recommended the award of the PhD. 

presentation.pdf
Most credit goes to Garr Reynolds

Visualization

If you remember movie “Minority report”, you may be delighted to know that interface featured in this movie is available for linux and mac, see demo video on http://oblong.com/ . There is an ongoing work to move this interface into wearable devices, see presentation on TED http://bit.ly/FOupJ

Building 3D social networks

Croquet IDE http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page . Software development kit for building 3D multi-user virtual world, similar to Second Life. See demo on the link - it shows that web programming doesn’t mean typing commands. Can it be our next alumni website?

Extend twitter

You possibly heard about twitter.com on radio or read about it in newspaper. This is a service which limits your post to 140 characters. But you may overlook that there are services like twitter, with source code available for free, see http://identi.ca/ code is available for download at http://laconi.ca/trac/ . Jaiku is another microblogging service running on google app engine http://www.jaiku.com/ with source code available at http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/

There is a project which extends an idea of microblogging with location aware services http://cloud27.com/, which is powered by http://pinaxproject.com/

Cloud computing

I mentioned google app engine earlier and this is representative of the modern trend called cloud computing or to be more precise software as services (SaaS). Cloud computing is reincarnation of very old idea of per hour usage of virtual machine (do you remember the old PL or IBM mainframes on which you can use 2 Mb RAM by hour only?). Pioneered by amazon elastic cloud (Amazon EC) which produced a service to allow people to hire virtual server on their premises and pay as little as 10 pence per hour. Here is an example how scientists are using cloud computing http://bit.ly/1KkWNR for intensive computation. There are several interesting projects: Amazon EC2 compatible open source projects are: http://enomalism.com/ and http://eucalyptus.cs.ucsb.edu/ Google App engine compatible open source project: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

VPN solution

Moving your own infrastructure on somebody’s else premises can cause some security issues and one of them can be addressed using Cohesive VPN Cubed http://www.cohesiveft.com/vpncubed/ which claims to be secure openvpn based solution and easily be deployed in distributed fashion. We are in process of preparing trial with Cohesive to run it on our equipment, so if you would like to contribute, please contact me.

Bookmarking and collaboration service

There is a yahoo own delicious.com service, which allow you to bookmark, assign a tag to the links and share them between your computers or friends. But recently emerged service which not only allow your to bookmark and share link, but add sticky notes or on the page and save and share this notes as well. See http://www.diigo.com.

I have a brand new cool piece of kit Anritsu MS2691A with optional signal generator inside. Apart from playing with it for the last two weeks, we spend half of the day with my prof trying to get the thing working.
You will be surprised to know that in order to understand how modern kit works you need additional Markoni 2300 signal generator and Tektronic 125 MHz oscilloscope.
Nice. Time spread for equipment is huge, Tektronic being dated back to fifty years.

What we often do in signal processing research is called prototyping. Commonly used tools for prototyping mathematical model is Matlab and Simulink, Mathematica and similar “bricks”.

it's just not widely distributed yet. This is my favorite quote.
Fellows real programmers Alex Ott and 13_49 pointed out to absolutely superb IDE for virtual worlds Croquet

I am just wondering how stable this platform on smalltalk is and applicable to researchers. It may be the thing to learn next year - smalltalk

PLoS Computational Biology: Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web

Interesting review article about using reference tools and digital libraries in modern day and age (and it's not down to bibtex and endnote nowdays)
Fellows be warned, people do check bibliography.

I recently had a chat with people who will be doing "portal" for our university, for sharing information between departments, may be even between groups of the researchers. Nice guys will be using ms sharepoint as back-end