Paris in the early days

It’s late and I’m still at work.  To be expected, as the week was fairly unproductive up until a meeting with Josef refocused me. As I’ve mentioned before, my lab is quite good, and he’s emblematic of that. He essentially introduced bag-of-features to the vision community with a paper called Video Google, and he works as hard as any researcher I’ve ever been around (and that includes you, Adrien!) Incredibly brilliant and incredibly nice, a good supervisor for me, as sometimes I need to be pushed, but ever-so-gently.

Right now I’m doing work involving face detection, and the title of the post is from Josef. I’m currently watching my script run just to be sure it doesn’t do anything stupid. When bounding boxes flash in the wrong places, those are the ghosts that haunt us. In this picture, of course, everything is kosher.

Tomorrow I leave for a week’s vacation, the first I’ve had since Christmas, and desperately needed. I’m going to Rimini, Italy, for Paganello, a European beach ultimate tournament. My team, the Yellow Submarines, is celebrating our ninth year together. We’re pretty good – we’ve won Wildwood a few times – but in nine years, a lot changes. Back in the day, Schmucker was reluctant to take me and Emily on the team, since Em was Dave’s new girlfriend, I was her friend, and he didn’t trust that we were any good at ultimate. We changed his mind pretty quickly. Then Dave and Em got married and had two kids, I moved to Seattle, Jared to NC, Pavel to NY, Geneva and I made it through grad school, and now I’m in Paris. Throughout all of it, we managed to get together at least once a year to play a tournament. I missed last year though, so I’m really looking forward to playing Paganello. It will also be great to see some Tufts alums (Becca, Anne-Marie, Sally) and Seattle friends (Wu, Zucker, Drew, Mer. Mer counts as Seattle because that’s where I met her.) Plus apparently most of Yaka is on my flight tomorrow. Animesh is taking care of the kitties, who are certain to hate me by the end of the week. And with that, I’m off! Pictures and posts from Italy next week.

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