April

  People come and go, some are like mystery story, no way I can trace them again.
  About work, first, I helped with the IS900 project, made the two system calibration difference very small, Dr. Wee is happy, Dr. Ross from GE Aviation is happy. Second, my own work, after struggling with Ronn Kling's "Calling C from IDL" for a couple of weeks, I think I finally understand the internal process of how to call C/C++ from IDL. 

求好运

  One week to finalize the outline, one week to write the draft, one week to modify with my advisers, and now, here it is! My first paper will be submitted to IPCV-2012 (at Vegas this July). Please wish me luck and I will cherish this opportunity!!!   

Summary written for P&G intern

My research interest is the major topic of image registration, with focus on the Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) application.

Image registration is to find the transformation between two images so that they can be spatially aligned. It involves several sub topics and some of them can be expanded and studied as Ph.D. thesis themselves which makes image registration a very comprehensive topic.  

Papers on this topic started to emerge from two decades ago, and based on my literature review on the papers, it is an application driven topic with major applications on medical area. For example, image guided surgery and medical images information fusion. Each paper proposes different algorithms dealing with different image modalities, such as PET/MRI, CT/MRI, or different imaging objects, such as brain, skull, and vessel.  

The NDE application I am working on comes from the contract project of GE Aviation. Their inspection team uses the most sophisticated inspection technologies such as digital X-ray, phased array ultrasonic, and infrared thermography to evaluate the integrity of engine components and materials. I am cooperating with them studying the registration between 2D Infrared image and 3D CT image. It is a double-challenge problem: first, images to be registered are of different dimensions; second, infrared/CT is a brand new modalities combination that has never been studied in registration area before. Therefore, algorithms proposed before are not guaranteed to work on this new application.

Until now, work I have done can be classified into three blocks: imaging principle of infrared and CT images, literature review of previous work on image registration algorithm, and experimental test. Using information theory measure I have had some preliminary results. From there, I will improve the algorithm to meet the speed and accuracy requirement.

What did I do this past month?

My plan was staying at home (the home at Weifang, China) for 30 days, from 31th, Dec to 30th, Jan, however, due to the visa problem, I postponed the schedule and didn't come back to US till two days ago. This made my vacation 40 day, and I got to spend three big festivals with my families: New Year, Chinese New Year, and Lantern Festival, which I think are the most important three festivals in Chinese culture. :)
Dad didn't change by look, but his personality is getting weird. His mid-age crisis with Mom went on and off during my stay. I'm not on either side of them, tried a lot to help them, encouraged them to communicate with each other, but it seemed like it didn't work very well. :(
Sometimes, I think I need to go back and stay forever to protect something or somebody. Mom and Dad are getting old, and start to have health problems from time to time. I want to stay for them. All my attachment is there, and him, the one I won't be able to get over for my whole life.
I found a box that i sealed 10 years ago in a drawer upstairs in the attic. I remember it, and haven't seen it for years I thought Mom through it away or lost it when we moved. Of course, it is not sealed anymore, and of course my parents opened it, and of course, they have "the right" to read my diaries and secrets. Three diaries, some old letters and gifts he gave me, and even one of his algebra notebook when we were in the No. 10 middle school. Suddenly, all those stuff brought me back to 10 years ago. Every words in the diary records those grey days in my life, and all about HIM. We met again, kinda like the old time but definitely different. Friend? More than friend? Life time friend? Thinking about the fact that we have been known each other for 20 years, and have been close to each other for 14 years just makes everything amazing and special.  And makes me afraid of losing it. We still care and hurt each other sometimes, as always.
It was good to be away US for a while to spend some special days with my family and also help me to get over J. Yes, right. It is time to be real Zhen's stone tough and stop fantasizing and move on!!!His personality disability should be something I hate/curse/be away forever. Let me put an end on it!!! Be Zhen!
No matter if i'm going back to China or not, now look around, I'm here, in US again. Zhen, face what you need to face right away, and solve problems one by one. And the most important thing is: keep your high dignity, respect yourself. Dad used to give me three words: 正确的，正面的，积极的。

My Christmas

I did not schedule anything for this Christmas, not even trying to. Just wanna be alone.
There was only one tomato left in the fridge and several eggs, so that made my 24th,I didn't go out to buy any food which I really regretted because when I tried to today, there is no store open! Two boxes of frozen food from CVS are my meal today, they are gross and I can feel my stomach complaining so hard now, it is yelling: I need vegetable! I need real food!
The most interesting and incredible thing happened during the Christmas is the 47 years old guy I emailed back and forth. Based on his email address, I googled his name and it turned out he is or was a professor at UC. Unbelievable and shocking! I found some family picture he shared on his page, there is a little Asian girl whom I guess is adopted by him. No wonder he claims that he wants to meet Asian lady. That is the reason! He is one of those Asian fevor guy! Omg!
Why is life so dramatic to me! So unpredictable to me?

Comparison of JAVA and C++

I was quickly going through this book "JAVA for everyone" (only two last chapters left), when I started to have a question: seems that JAVA is much easier than C++, then what is the difference between these two programming languages? and why did college teach us C++ instead of JAVA?
I guess Wikipedia is the most convenient source to find the answer for the first question, here is some summation I made. So far, I still cannot understand everything they explained, but anyway, let me write down what I can understand first:
Design aims: C++ was designed for systems and application programming, extending C language which means it added support for statically-typed object-oriented programming, exception handling, scoped resource management and generic programming. JAVA was created initially as an interpreter for printing systems but grew to support network computing. It is a statically-typed object-oriented language too that used syntax similar with C++, but is not compatible with it.
Compilation: C++ source code is written to be platform independent, and then is compiled into native machine code while JAVA code is first compiled into byte-code for the JVM(Java virtual machine), so JAVA code is dependent on the JAVA platform and not dependent on OS.
Struct and Union: JAVA only supports class, does not support struct or union.
"." operator: In C++, it takes an object as the left operand and access a member of the object. In JAVA, it takes a reference to an object as the left operand and access a member of that object (the equivalent operator in C++ is "->", which takes a pointer as the left operand).
Pointer v.s. reference: In C++, pointers can point directly to memory address. In java, similar thing is called references, but references can only refer to objects and arrays. Java references do not allow direct access to memory address or allow memory addresses to be manipulated with pointer arithmetic. In C++, on can construct pointers to pointers, pointers to ints and doubles and pointers to arbitrary memory locations. Java references can only access objects and arrays, never primitives, other references, or memory locations.
So far, this is what I can understand best for the first question, maybe I will add something more as I know more about the comparison.
As for the second one, I turned to Baidu.com since I first learned C++ in college in China. The answer is C++ is a foundation of learning other programming languages, it is much easier to learn JAVA after you have already known something about C++ (I agree).

It all starts from that big alarm!

    T started his PhD program as the same year as I did, and we are the only two Chinese students in system track in EE. In fact, there are only three system students total. Recently, he got an internship job from Intel at CA. The moment I heard it, a big bomb was dropped in my head, caused millions of thoughts and left a big alarm keep going on and on.
    It is true that T is five years older than me, one more Master degree than me, more experience than me, and more creative than me...but still, that alarm forced me to think what is the best for me, for my future career.
    What I learned and what I am studying is still too far away from the real life application. Of course no one can guarantee that it's a perfect match between school study and job requirement, and I am assuming I'm not the only one who is struggling about it. But I guess what I need is some confidence to ease the problem, the confidence that I can gain from full preparation.
    It's good to have sense of crisis, it pushes me to move forward instead of staying at the same place forever. But I am also aware what my shortage is: passionate but not long lasting. That's why I started this blog and use it as a journal/notebook/poster to record my life, to remind myself the reason I started it.