"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Category: Science Page 1 of 3

Christian earns a challenge coin

Christian was given one of the coolest challenge coins ever for some of the research he has accomplished in his job. He got one from his professor when he was getting his PhD, but this seems like a much bigger deal. They gave it to him after and invited talk he gave on that research. He is scheduled to give and even more important talk in a few months. It really is amazing to see him performing at this level.

All raccoons all the time

Almost everywhere we put our GaugeCam cameras, raccoons show up. They are amazing little animals. They have been particularly prominent at the KOLA location in Kearney, Nebraska. They are totally fascinating–I get addicted to watching them.

Bacteria imaging work

I am working through the weekend to finish some algorithms for a demo one of our sales people needs to do on Monday. The purpose of the demo is to show that we can measure bacteria in images with sufficient precision and enough features (contour roughness, 3-D, inferences, shape analysis, texture analysis, etc.) to inform the customers about the things they want to know including differentiation of bacteria types, size, growth rates, etc. Honestly, I love doing this kind of task. It seems like when there are “hair-on-fire” moments, ideas seem to percolate a bit more than at other times. I think that might be because as the results from one algorithm are available, the knowledge derived from that can inspire new ideas.

Bacteria and fungus weekend

We have a big demo coming up at my day job that has to do with the ability to measure different types of bacteria and one type of fungus in an time series of images. Of course, I have only gotten this one image so far, the whole time series is to follow soon, so the clock does not start ticking on the demo development until I have downloaded all the images. What that means is that I am almost certainly going to be working all weekend long, late into the night on these things. This probably should make me sad, but frankly, this stuff is really, really fun when one can get it to work and I am pretty much looking forward to the work–or at least the end product if I can get it right.

El Scientifico y su artista

The one on the left is Tío Lauro’s etching titled El Científico. The one on the right is a picture of Christian that Lorena took from his apartment in Cambridge working from home for the day. Not only the likeness, but the character/posture/spirit/intensity is captured with amazing accuracy in the grabado.

Original GaugeCam research

The first “product” we developed when the GaugeCam project started back in 2009 at NCSU was called GRIM. That stood for GaugeCam Remote Image Manager. The name did not evoke a sense of positivity, so in the spirit of G.R.O.S.S. from Calvin and Hobbes (i.e. Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS), we added Educational and changed the software name to GRIME. A MUCH better name for people mucking around in the mud. Today, Troy sent me some of the accuracy research results for the project. We (and she) think it is Kelly’s handwriting, but we are really not sure. At the top of the page you can see GRIM VERSION: 0.1j. I looked at the appendix of my dissertation that holds the release notes for all the GRIME software I wrote and it says that it was released on July 30, 2009. It is cool that we have a record that shows we were doing the research from that far back.

Christian presents his research

Christian is scheduled to present the research from his work to at the 2023 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ACSSC 2023) this morning. The title of his presentation is “Online Null Adaption on a Digital Controllable Reflectarray Receiver.” He has been working on this work for quite a while now, but it is finished and he has now moved on to something new. He took the seven hour flight (SEVEN HOURS!!!!) from Boston to San Francisco, then drove down to the conference center in time for the first plenary talk yesterday. Of course, he stopped by In-N-Out for an “animal style” hamburger on the drive down.

Frank and Mark

I have been working with a couple of guys in different capacities for close to forty years. The last twenty years or so, I have used them as consultants for difficult machine vision work. I never would have imagined when I first met them that we would still be working together so many years later. They are both exceptionally talented machine vision algorithm developers. When I talk about Frank I say that he is pretty much the Mozart in our field, and he is. In addition to machine vision and among other things, Frank is a truffle hunter. He and a friend wrote a book titled “Field Guide to North American Truffles.” Mark, in a very different way, is just as talented. He got his Ph.D. in Physics from a co-author of Albert Einstein, has an Erdos number of 3, and is indispensable when it comes to the math of image processing. The synergy created when they work together is with par in the little technical world in which we live. I am amazed they still love to do this at 75 plus years of age and even more amazed that I get to do it with them. They are part of the reason I am loathe to retire anytime soon. Even more importantly, I am glad to call him my friend.

Christian is a scientist

I love this picture of Christian. This picture was taken when he was 20-years old and two years and change into his Ph.D. He had come to visit us when we were living in an apartment in Lewisville, Texas. During those years and even now, we see Christian in this mode. Thinking. It is hard to overstate the difficulty of the research program onto which he had embarked. The difficulty and importance of his work has accelerated since he received his appointment at MIT. His work is hard in ways that few people are equipped to understand. He is one of those few who are able to move between the development of difficult theoretical solutions to their implementation in mechanical and electrical hardware and the software that drives it all.

BIBLE: New Testament read #38 (New Living Translation) — Complete

Congratulations to Hemex Health!

Hemex Health has released their Sickle Cell Disease diagnostic product (PDF brochure here). It is a big deal because it is inexpensive and fast (10 minutes) compared to previous methods of diagnosis. This product will save lives through early diagnosis. I was fortunate to develop some of the enabling technology for this product, for a brief period as a volunteer and later on as a contractor. Congratulations Peter, Patty and the whole team for this successful product release!

Christian arrives in Boston

Christian flew into Boston yesterday afternoon to look for apartments before he starts work at MIT next week. We went to California Pizza–the same place we went when we looked for an apartment in Tempe when he started his PhD at Arizona State University. After dinner, I gave him a tour of Thrive Bioscience where I work. He liked it a lot. The part he liked best was the instruments I showed him that we build. He designed one of the most important algorithms we use in the growing of stem cells. It was really nice for him to be able to see where his algorithm is being used. It is hard to overstate how import was his work in this development.

Refereed articles for Christian

Christian is getting toward the end of his PhD program at Arizona State University. His first, first-author, refereed journal article, A Decentralized Receiver in Gaussian Interference, was published in Entropy in April of 2018. Just over the last week or so, he served as a reviewer for an article in that same journal and is now on the list and will review more articles there. He has two more articles in process that  will be submitted very soon that will form part of his dissertation. Hopefully, he will defend this thesis and be done sometime this summer or early fall. It has been a long, hard haul and his is looking forward to getting out of school and going to work.

GaugeCam update

It has been a month or so since I have provided an update on the Retirement PhD/GaugeCam projects–they are kind of tied to each other. Everything is not complete (I think we are about halfway there), but everything that is complete has been up and running for over a month on two separate computers: 1) A Raspberry Pi and 2) a plain vanilla Ubuntu Server. The plan for over the holidays was to jump back in and see if I could get the project to the point where we could do a beta deployment, but that was not to happen–suffered a minor setback due to a cold. So, now I am talking to my buddy John H. down in Arizona (well, up actually, if we are talking altitude and not global direction). Hopefully, I can get him on the project, partially because he is a profoundly better embedded programmer than me and partially because it is a lot more fun to do this kind of thing with a friend. We are still on a long slow approach to entry into a PhD program, but it is still on track. We have added two new sets of functionality that will be required for the GaugeCam work and John will be perfect for that if he has time to do it.

An article on Wilder Penfield’s scientific reasons for believing in mind/brain dualism

Wilder Penfield’s conversion from ardent “strident materialist” to “passionate dualist” was a result of the scientific brain research he performed in his work as a neurosurgeon. Michael Egnor explains it all here. Egnor further notes that there is an even more compelling case for dualism based on a philosophical and logic arguments that dovetail nicely with the scientific ones. The article is well worth the read. He makes this statement at the end of the article.

The denial of free will is an ideological bias, not a credible scientific or philosophical conclusion.

Michael Egnor: Another article on the mind-brain problem

The entire purpose of this post a marker to this new article by Michael Egnor on the mind brain problem described in this article at the Discovery Institute. He is a pediatric neurosurgeon who has considered both the physiological and philosophical (with special emphasis on the writings of Thomas Aquinas) implications  of the conflation of the mind with the brain. This article, titled Science and the Soul, as is the the entire body of his work that I have read so far, is extremely well written makes a very, very strong case that the mind is not the brain.

(h.t. Discovery Institute News and View)

Camera copy stand

A very cool new toy arrived at our door a couple of days ago. It is a camera copy stand that will hold a cellphone or other arbitrary item that fits a certain form factor. It will be invaluable in the bean sorting project, but I will be able to use it for a lot of other machine vision image capture testing tasks. We have made a lot of progress on the project and expect to start buying the actual cameras and lighting we hope to use within the next few weeks. The next difficult task is to drop the beans past a camera while we synchronize the capture and lighting of the scene so the bean is not blurry and we can see the surface of both sides very well. There are more tricky little things we need to do after that, but we cannot move forward until we know that is possible. As soon as that is figured out, I will see if Gene can help me set up a more permanent test fixture to systematically drop beans past the cameras so we can gather a test set from which to build a classifier.

Incredible evolution

When I say evolution is incredible, especially the abiogenesis part, I really mean it. It is not credible. James Tour is incredible, but in the popular sense of the word. Watch this video to see why.

Wolfe, Chomsky and Everett

The Kingdom of Speech by Tom WolfeI wrote in a previous post. about the kerfuffle surrounding two scholars of linguistics and Tom Wolfe’s fascinating commentary on it in his book The Kingdom of Speech. I just read an article about the affair that had a great quote in it that I wanted to preserve on this blog so I can return to it and point to it now and again. It is an interesting article that is worth a read. The quote:

Chomsky’s theory of language, as will be evident to the reader of Everett’s piece, is on a par with Darwinism. A theory about nothing but itself about how things happen. We could leave it out and nothing would change except the air would be cleaner. Not that Everett says this, of course.

Continued insights on the mind-brain problem

Michael Egnor recently authored a new article in First Things on the mind-brain problem titled A Map of the Soul. I am really just putting this up here as a placeholder and reference for use in future discussions. Egnor writes clearly and concisely about something he has studied up close as a brain surgeon. In addition, it is obvious that he has spent time trying to understand Philosophy and Philosophy of mind. He makes a compelling case for a dualist view. Here is an excerpt of some the observations that have informed his belief in the existence of the mind apart from the brain:

Wilder Penfield, an early-twentieth-century neurosurgeon who pioneered seizure surgery, noted that during brain stimulation on awake patients, he was never able to stimulate the mind itself—the sense of “I”—but only fragmented sensations and perceptions and movements and memories. Our core identity cannot be evoked or altered by physical stimulation of the brain.

Relatedly, Penfield observed that spontaneous electrical discharges in the brain cause involuntary sensations and movements and even emotions, but never abstract reasoning or calculation. There are no “calculus” seizures or “moral” seizures, in which patients involuntarily take second derivatives or ponder mercy.

Similar observations emerge from Roger Sperry’s famous studies of patients who had undergone surgery to disconnect the hemispheres of the brain. This was done to prevent seizures. The post-operative patients experienced peculiar perceptual and behavioral changes, but they retained unity of personal identity—a unified intellect and will. The changes Sperry discovered in his research (for which he won a Nobel Prize) were so subtle as to pass unnoticed in everyday life.

Is there a mathematical theory of evolution?

Introduction to Evolutionary InformaticsAn article about a book titled Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics starts out like this:

Five years ago, Gregory Chaitin, a co-founder of the fascinating and mind-bending field of algorithmic information theory, offered a challenge:

The honor of mathematics requires us to come up with a mathematical theory of evolution and either prove that Darwin was wrong or right!

In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, co-authored by William A. Dembski, Winston Ewert, and myself, we answer Chaitin’s challenge in the negative: There exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. Period. By “model,” we mean definitive simulations or foundational mathematics required of a hard science.

The article is very interesting in its own right, but I am also looking forward to reading the book. I am sure the whole book is worth a read, but my interest got piqued in particular by a some statements in the article about the measurement of meaning in information:

8. Information theory cannot measure meaning.

Poppycock.

The manner in which information theory can be used to measure meaning is addressed in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. We explain, for example, why a picture of Mount Rushmore containing images of four United States presidents has more meaning to you than a picture of Mount Fuji even though both pictures might require the same number of bits when stored on your hard drive. The degree of meaning can be measured using a metric called algorithmic specified complexity.

Rather than summarize algorithmic specified complexity derived and applied in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we refer instead to a quote from a paper from one of the world’s leading experts in algorithmic information theory, Paul Vitányi. The quote is from a paper he wrote over 15 years ago, titled “Meaningful Information.”22

One can divide…[KCS] information into two parts: the information accounting for the useful regularity [meaningful information] present in the object and the information accounting for the remaining accidental [meaningless] information.23

In Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, we use information theory to measure meaningful information and show there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution.

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