Categories
research talk

Talking at Ricoh: What’s in a place?

The following is the abstract of a talk I will be giving at the Ricoh California Research Center on Monday (11-Jun-07)

What’s in a place: Using geotagged images to explore the world
Can we automatically create an “attraction map” of the world from Flickr geotagged images and their associated tags? We performed an analysis of Flickr data and developed a visualization technique called Tag Maps to do exactly that. Using the analysis and the Tag Maps visualization, we created an exploration tool called World Explorer that allows one to, well, explore the world like never before.

The idea behind the data analysis is simple: by taking a photo, photographers essentially express their interest in a particular place, and implicitly “vote” in favor of that location.… Read the rest

Categories
cars track days videos

One lap of Reno-Fernley Raceway (N95 video)

Lap of Reno-Fernley Raceway (Nokia N95) from rnair on Vimeo

I finally got around to editing and uploading some of the video* I recorded during my last trackday. This was the first time I was using the Nokia N95 and I had high expectations from the high-rez camera. As you can see over here the video quality is dramatically better than my past recordings from the N73. I have been planning on getting a ChaseCam PDR setup for a while but now that I can get such excellent video from the phone I think I will stick to my homebrew cellphone setup.… Read the rest

Categories
mashup

GeoRSS maker

I’ve had some time over the weekend and decided to put some finishing touches on a couple of mashups that I started a few months ago but never completed. The first of these is the GeoRSS Maker which is something I dreamed up when I was making a GeoRSS file for my F1 circuit guide. At that time the process I uses was to first make a GeoRSS template file with a bunch of empty item elements before manually looking up the geographical coordinates of each individual racetrack(usually available on wikipedia) and entering the data into the template. This process was painful enough that I decided to build an automated way to extract coordinates from Wikipedia and insert them into a GeoRSS file.… Read the rest

Categories
cars track days

Spinning out at 95 mph

Reno-Fernley course map

I was at the NCRC trackday at Reno-Fernley Raceway last weekend when I got some first hand experience of what happens in a high speed spin. I was coming down the front straight at well over 100 mph and slowed slightly to take the esses that make up turn 1. Now on the track map they may look like fairly severe turns but in actual fact you just lift a little bit to settle the car at the end of the straight before flooring it though S bends. On this particular lap I came in a little hotter than on my previous runs and just after i made it though turn 1 (but before 1A) the back end came around and I flew off the track at 95 mph.… Read the rest

Categories
personal

My Precious

My precious
A big thanks to my friend Sowmya for getting me a Nintendo Wii from the EA store. If you are still looking for one just ask your friendly neighborhood EA employee to pick one up from their company store – they apparently get 5-10 units every day.

Unfortunately I haven’t yet played with it yet because after I hooked it up to the TV I couldn’t find the damn TV remote wall bashwall bashwall bash.… Read the rest