Tips and Tricks

This is where my long-form writing is – in other words, the blog. Shorter notes are at TIL.

Posts here are by topic; a selection are listed in reverse chronological order here.

A selection of posts from here and all from TIL by tag: /til/til-by-tags/

Quicklinks to topics.

• arXiv.
• Academic papers and conferences.
• Research life and career.
• OpenCV->OpenGL.
• N-view triangulation methods.
• Numerical Linear Algebra posts.
• Projective Geometry posts.
• Miniature Research Surveys.
• Miscellaneous.
• Geometric Camera Calibration Webinar.
• Websites / Jekyll / Twitter cards / Mastodon cards.
• Professional Development Notes for ECRs.
• Docker.

arXiv.

• Hands off arXiv! (Part I) a post co-written with Dmytro Mishkin. and Medium version.
• What does it mean to publish your scientific paper in 2020? (Part II) a post co-written with Dmytro Mishkin. and Medium version.
• arXiv paper explainer.

Academic papers and conferences.

• Mental health terms in papers, trends and opinions.
• Latex math commands I have newly learned or consistently forget.
• Code release integrity: if you don’t have a public code release, don’t say that you do.
• On Opting Out: not submitting to CVPR 2022.
• Comments on the social media motion at CVPR 2021, a post co-written with Dmytro Mishkin.
• What is a paper? What are its costs?
• Constructive review examples (work in progress).
• One person’s approach to writing.
• Poster session strategies.
• Large-conference packing strategies.
• Basic paper submission checklist.
• How to review technical papers: my strategy.
• List-article of scientific tips: writing, speaking, social media, code.

Research life and career.

• The Research Career Constraint Satisfaction Problem
• What personal information is appropriate on USA-oriented CVs?
• IEEE senior member process.
• Numerical Linear Algebra textbook recommendations from others.

OpenCV->OpenGL.

Suppose you want to model some cameras, calibrated according to the computer vision conventions we all know and love, in OpenGL. How?

• Part one: Converting OpenCV cameras to OpenGL cameras – theory and equations.
• Part two: minimal working code examples.
• Part three: Rotating models with OpenGL.

N-view Triangulation Methods

Landing page for N-view triangulation posts.

Numerical Linear Algebra posts

Landing page Numerical Linear Algebra posts.

No classification yet.

• A custom program to watermark images using Image Magick.
• Getting started in wildlife photography: favorite guides and impressions.
• Creating stop-action movies at home.

Geometric Camera Calibration Webinar.

I gave a webinar, “Transforming pixels to millimeters: Geometric camera calibration”, for the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) on geometric camera calibration. This webinar is tailored for plant biologists, and the types of problems they may want to solve within the plant phenotyping context. However, the webinar would also be appropriate if you are working on 2D computer vision/image processing and want a big picture view of geometric camera calibration.

• Webinar description, at ASPB’s Plantae
• Webinar recording, at ASPB’s Plantae.
• Github repository of notes, amy-tabb/Plantae-seminar-Nov2018 .
• Another Github repository, chessboard calibration code: amy-tabb/basic-chessboard-cali .
• Camera as a scanner protocol and code.

Websites.

• Website starter guide in 2020.
• Using Docker to generate websites with Jekyll: a howto.

Social media preview cards: Twitter cards / Twitter / Mastodon.

(In 2018) I figured out what Twitter cards were. My first searches were “why do my links in Twitter look so terrible?” The answer: I didn’t have Twitter card markup in the links from two websites – this one (Jekyll), and a WordPress one for the technical committee I co-chair. So here’s some notes on how I fixed that:

• Creating Twitter card templates for WordPress.
• Creating Twitter cards on Jekyll-generated websites.

• When to use summary or large Twitter cards?

• Custom tweet deleting when you have more than 3,200 tweets.
• Mastodon cards, or PreviewCards.

Professional Development Notes for ECRs in ECE and CS.

What’s an ECR? Early Career Researcher.

• Looking for a good CV template without a class? Here’s one.
• Creating a CV when you are a graduate student, ECE or CS.
• The importance of Google Scholar profiles.
• Creating a website.
• Statement of Purpose for graduate school.

Docker.

Getting up and running with deep learning using Docker, case using FastAI 2020 course.

• Page 1: Setup: NVIDIA, Docker, FastAI.
• Page 2: Digging into the details of page 1.
• Page 3: Notes for running the FastAI 2020 Jupyter notebooks, Chapters 1-9.

Suppose you have no illustions of being a DevOps expert, but do want to release your research-grade code to the world with Docker. How do you do it? That’s the point of these posts, from an Ubuntu-centric, C++-biased viewpoint. (2018.)

• Docker, Part 1: Hello world.
• Docker, Part 2: Simulated release, automated builds on Docker hub.
• Docker, Part 3: The backend: setting up OS versions, libraries, and building images efficiently with cmake.

Docker: What’s the deal with WORKDIR?