My first mapping paper
As a graduate student in Physics back in the mid 1980s, I used to go two floors down from my office to a state mapping agency housed in Hasbrouck Hall at UMass. I mostly rummaged about looking at the expensive aerial images and maps. The guy in charge (I forgot his name) was very kind to me and occasionally pointed out good deals to me. I still have an aerial image of the Connecticut River crossing the Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom gap that I bought back then. I recently submitted my first mapping paper to the 8th Optical 3D Methods conference this July in Zurich. In retrospect, it looks to me like a long, random journey with an applied bias. The randomness was induced by the times I changed jobs and suspended in that uncertainty of the transition the bias of my interest made me think — “Maybe I can get a job making maps?”.
Dreams come true. Two years ago I was looking for a new job. I got a call from Brian Pinette asking if I was interested in a job doing a classifier for a Digital Elevation Model software system. I immediately said yes and that work has now lead to this paper on how to make DEMs better by exploiting the asymmetric matches computers make when asked to identify the same object in two photographs.
