Job
|
 |
Yes, everyone has to make a living somehow. You would think that someone
would be willing to pay me money just to sit around playing with new ideas,
hoping to discover something useful (read: profitable). That is commonly
referred to as research -- finding a research job in SA is rather difficult,
partly because all SA companies are far to short-sighted to realise the
benefit of (potentially pointless) research.
Update: Strangely enough, I managed to secure a research position at
the Meraka Institute/CSIR. This means I am now working
in the Remote Sensing Research Unit.
|
Ph.D Thesis
|
|
I have recently completed my Ph.D thesis, entitled "An Analysis
of Particle Swarm Optimizers" Here's the abstact:
| |
Many scientific, engineering and economic problems involve the
optimisation of a set of parameters. These problems include examples
like minimising the losses in a power grid by finding the optimal
configuration of the components, or training a neural network to
recognise images of people's faces. Numerous optimisation algorithms
have been proposed to solve these problems, with varying degrees of
success. The Particle Swarm Optimiser (PSO) is a relatively new
technique that has been empirically shown to perform well on many of
these optimisation problems. This thesis presents a theoretical model
that can be used to describe the long-term behaviour of the algorithm.
An enhanced version of the Particle Swarm Optimiser is constructed and
shown to have guaranteed convergence on local minima. This algorithm
is extended further, resulting in an algorithm with guaranteed
convergence on global minima. A model for constructing cooperative PSO
algorithms is developed, resulting in the introduction of two new
PSO-based algorithms. Empirical results are presented to support the
theoretical properties predicted by the various models, using synthetic
benchmark functions to investigate specific properties. The various
PSO-based algorithms are then applied to the task of training neural
networks, corroborating the results obtained on the synthetic benchmark
functions.
|
You can download the complete thesis (in Postcript format) from my publications page.
|
M.Sc Thesis
|
|
My M.Sc thesis dealt mainly with a Computer Vision application. Here's
the abstract from my thesis, "A Device-free Locator using Computer Vision
Techniques":
| |
"Device-free locators allow the user to interact with a system without the
burden of being physically in contact with some input device or without
being connected to the system with cables. This thesis presents a
device-free locator that uses computer vision techniques to recognize and
track the user's hand. The system described herein uses a video camera to
capture live video images of the user, which are segmented and processed to
extract features that can be used to locate the user's hand within the
image. Two types of features, namely
moment based invariants and Fourier descriptors, are compared
experimentally. An important property of both these techniques is that they
allow the recognition of hand-shapes regardless of affine transformation,
e.g.
rotation within the plane or scale changes. A neural network is used to
classify the extracted features as belonging to one of several hand signals,
which can be used in the locator system as 'button clicks' or mode
indicators. The Siltrack system described herein illustrates that the above
techniques can be implemented in real-time on standard hardware."
|
You can download the complete thesis (in Postcript format) from my publications page.
|
Other projects
|
|
I have more than a passing interest in distributed computing. My third
year project involved a distributed system written in Java. It was disguised
as a multiplayer game, though ;)
My true passion remains computer graphics, but at the
moment I'm also doing some experiments with digital signal processing
(FFT's, compression, pattern recognition, etc.). These interests
are more of a hobby, but I do code regularly at these problems (I have
yet to produce a program that other people will find useful, but then
again, I'm just coding for my own pleasure anyway).
I've done quite a bit of research in AI over the last three years,
mostly on Neural Network training algorithms. This explains my interest
in Optimization, which led me to Particle Swarm Optimizers.
|
