CMPT414 Couse project proposal

I'm currently taking CMPT414 model based computational vision. We need to do a final term project. One of my classmates and I formed a team and proposed a project about a neural network specifically for recognizing handwritten digits. Ideally, the final product would take images of handwritten digits and output predicated digit, ranging from [0, 9], with comparatively high accuracy. The product will have various real world applications. One example would be a Chinese postal code reader as in China the ZIP code consists of 5 numeric digits. If more time is available, we would also like to expand our project to real world data. For example, we can use some scanned real handwritten images as the input of the built neural network and see the results. This will involve some image pre-processing techniques, such as noise removal, skew detection and correction, character normalization and so on.
We will mainly focus on the implementation of the algorithm and leave out the UI part. Matlab will be our main programming tool.

MNIST database (http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/index.html ) will be used as the benchmark for this project. The MNIST database of handwritten digits consists of a training set of 60,000 examples, and a test set of 10,000 examples. It has been widely used in lots of projects or research works. Dr. Yann LeCun (http://yann.lecun.com/) has implemented a neural network which achieves 99.18% accuracy (i.e., an error rate of only 0.82%). This error rate served as a type of "benchmark" for many others’ research works and could be the goal of our project as well, which might be challenging. The data files of this database are not in any standard image format. We will have to write our own program to read them.

Mike O'Neill has implemented a complete project for Handwritten Digits Recognition, with demonstration graphic UI. He has released the details of his design in the article of Neural Network for Recognition of Handwritten Digits. Mike built Five-layer Convolutional Neural Network and applied Second Order Methods in back propagation to optimize the performance. Mike’s digit recognition project achieves 99.26% accuracy on MNIST dataset. We will follow his design and implement the essential algorithm.

I think the idea and design is pretty cool. I will be very happy if we can achieve above 99% accuracy!

Shen Xue&Zhao Hongbo, elusive pairs gold, touching moment!

Tonight, I had an awesome dinner at Greg's place. There were Greg, Kat (his wife), me, three other DDP students and Liyang from WICS. It is kind of like potluck. Kat made fried rice; I made dumplings and helped fry Bok Choy; Yoyo and Jianfeng brought two traditional chinese dishes; Liyang brought egg tarts; Greg made Westlake Fish and cheese cake. The cheese cake was soooo good, even better than the one I had in cheese cake etc.Everybody was asking for the recipe in the end. :P

Well, the most fun part was when we were watching pair figure skating final game after the dinner. There were three chinese teams and Shen, Xue and Zhao, Hongbo obviously received most of the attentions. Both of them were above 35. They have been skating for decades and have always been partners. They actually got married a couple of years ago. They have won many golds in various games, but never in Olympic. It is all the athletes' dream to step onto the podium of Olympic gold medal. That is why this couple came to this Winner Olympic game.

So when it was announced that their final score was 216.57 points and the rank 1 was CHINA, I saw this couple crying, screaming and hugging each other. I saw their excitement and happiness flowing from their faces.Zhao Hongbo started talking in Chinese, to Shen Xue also to himself, "I can't believe it... it is like a dream..." This is such a touching moment.

I like watching games such as figure skating, because it is not as hostile. The athletes are performing. They are trying to show their best to the world, to demonstrate the beauty.Not like other kinds of sports, where it is more like fighting with each other.

And I enjoy the most at the ending part of the game, when the winning athletes shows their emotions. Always touching moment to watch.

Anyways, I'm so happy for this couple and for China!
Go China Go!

My Olympic Break Starts with Awsome Vancouver Art Gallary Visit~

Winner Olympic comes, bringing us two weeks of break.. Yeah...
Many of my chinese went back to China and celebrate Chinese new year with family.. I feel jealous....

But anyways, yesterday after class, I went to downtown with my friend and we visited Vancouver Art Gallery, next to Robson Square. The Olympic British Columbia Pavilion was just open. And it is free for visitors to access.

There were a long line-up when we got there. But the line moves pretty fast and has very good order. Meanwhile, there were volunteers lead the visitor along the line and talked friendly. I saw so many Canadian flags flying all around, on bags, cloths,faces... Patriotism is always the theme for this kind of event...

In no more than 10 minutes, I entered the gallery. There are four floors, but only the forth one allows photography. And actually, the floor one is the most interesting one. They have a number of interactive displays highlighting the rich cultural fabric of both British Columbia and Canada. Lots of fun... The 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors are mostly about the history, culture and nature of BC, along with some art works from artists.
It was very impressing and the best of all, it is free to access. Yay~

I feel lucky now that I chose to stay in Vancouver during the Olympic break. So many things go on all around Vancouver. I can pretty much go downtown and check out events everyday...

I'm looking forward to the coming-up events. Not worry about assignment for now... :p

Offer received!

I received the phone call from the recruiter on Tuesday.He didn't tell me the result right away. Instead, he said a couple of questions, like how do you feel about the interviews, do you think you will fit in the team, how do you like the project, what makes you choose MS over IBM, and etc. I felt it was like another round of interview. In the end, he finally said "yes, we are going to give you the offer".I was not like jumping up and down, but more like, finally~

The following phone call was basically about the offer package. I think I'm quite happy about what they are offering. However, I still didn't accept the offer right away. Instead, I talked to my parents and a couple of my friends. I guess I wasn't quite sure about whether to work at States or not. But since I'm young, everybody is encouraging me to try it out. And of course, this is MS, really hard to reject.The recruiter was very nice that he sent an email to the project manager, the project that I was interviewed for, and ask him to connect with me and help me to make the decision if I have any. This kind of touches me. I emailed both of them back and accepted the offer.

It has been almost one week.My state is migrating from exciting to more like "OMG, I am going to step out of school". Am I ready yet? Will I miss school? Would I enjoy living in Seattle? Well, these are supposed to be questions before applying the position, which I start to concern about now.

No matter what, this is a step which will eventually happen. Start of another phase of my life.