De Rerum Natura

Our technical report on how to recover precision error estimates with ${\ell }_1$-minimization has been accepted by the 2008 International Conference on Machine Learning.

The paper originally got three anonymous reviews. Two were positive, one strongly negative. In our response to the reviews, we agreed with the general criticism by the reviewers that one experimental demonstration is not enough. In our precision error papers so far, we have only been using one dataset — aerial photographs from the Twenty-Nine Palms region in California. So we are going to include some results from North Carolina forest data to show that our technique works for all sorts of images.

Readers of previous posts may note that besides maps, the precision error has been recovered for questions in a multiple-choice-quesiton (MCQ) exam. It would be nice to include this in our ICML paper, but the title of the paper is “Autonomous geometric precision error estimation in low-level computer vision tasks” so it seems incongruous to do so.

The paper was submitted in early January. Afterwards, we realized that our precision error technique for elevation errors in maps applies to any set of models that make scalar predictions about multiple entities. We are now working on a draft for a Science magazine article that will combine the examples from maps and exams to illustrate the wide applicability of our technique.

Version 2.5 of WordPress has introduced a ‘’shortcode” API that allows you to write things like

My caption

and have WordPress post-process this with functions that have been registered to handle the caption block. Is this the way to integrate MathML and Latex into WordPress?

I have started the update of MediaWiki 1.11.2 to incorporate Blahtex functionality. My goal is to have pages that validate as correct XHTML+MathML. The work is being detailed here.

The update is not trivial. The current hacked version of MediaWiki at BerliOS that incorporates blahtex is based on version 1.7. The MediaWiki installation I am playing with is at the latest version: 1.11.2. To figure out how to concentrate on the relevant parts, I am using Unix utilities diff and wc. Basically, I start by counting lines and try to figure out how many new lines are accounted for by new classes or functions added.

I have started the painful process of enabling MathML support on MediaWiki. This is crucial for my use of wiki technology in my workflow. Check out the first step I have taken: enabling texvc (which produces either HTML or .png output).

The next step is to connect it with blahtex so I produce true MathML and correct XHTML headers with MathML. This is not trivial since the blahtex hacked distribution over at BerliOS is at version 1.7 for MediaWiki but the current version is at number 1.11.2. This means that I have to go thru the list of blahtex modified files in the current version.

I have done something similar for MathML on this blog (using itex2MML). It clearly is the case that the math enabled web is still far from being the default. When I have time, and if I succeed in creating a strict XHTML+MathML MediaWiki version, I’ll document my steps somewhat similarly to the steps I took with WordPress .

Two weeks ago I migrated this blog to WordPress 2.3 and in the process I had to go over the steps for enabling itex2MML. I have collected the necessary steps in a draft of an article itex2MML for WordPress 2.3. The whole thing is based on Jacque Distler’s rewrite of itex2MML. The article is in a rough draft form, but if anyone is interested, I’ll put more details in it. By changing itex2MML, the theme pages, and the WordPress 2.3 files, I was able to get output that has been validated as correct XHTML + MathML, CSS by the W3C consortium validators.