It’s been nearly a month since I arrived here in Singapore and to be honest, it’s been going fast. Maybe due to the hectic pace of life or maybe because I’m still struggling with finding a proper rhythm. I have been doing tons of stuff, but I think I am forgetting as many things I should do as things I am doing. It was only today I found out I hadn’t actually informed the people that have to agree on my curriculum about the courses I applied and got accepted to. But I’ve now got 4 nice courses I’m going to do.

CS4243 – Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
A course in which you learn a lot about using Matlab to analyze images. There’s a project that’s part of the course in which you are supposed to create a system which does something … visual. Examples of last year are a chess computer that uses camera’s to read the chessboard and a camera that can track moving faces in its image. I’m quite excited about it, mainly because I don’t know too much about programming. I know a lot about perception and related subjects like optical flow. And some stuff about signal analysis and using Fourier transforms to analyze these. Ah well, we’ll see how it turns out…

CS5340 – Uncertainty Modelling in AI
Presumably the hardest course I’m taking. It mainly aims at using Bayesian networks in order to model uncertainty. Bayesian networks are mathematical models that can be used to model a number of things. For the people that have been watching House (just watched s2e24, and it’s awesome!), a differential diagnosis is basically a Bayesian network. You use a number of evidences to try and find out what the most likely cause is.
An example from cognition is the word recognition model by McClelland and Rummelhart (1981) in which different aspects of words, letters and elements of letters are used to find the most likely word that is depicted by a number of letters. However, this last example might be a neural network… I’m not entirely sure yet. But I’m sure I’ll know the difference in a matter of weeks!

PL5221 – Analyzing Psychological Data using General Linear Models
Even though I already have a pretty decent background in statistics, I think it’s worth just to know a little bit more. I’ve seen a couple of things on GLM’s, but every time I need to run one on data, I encounter words I don’t know the meaning of in SPSS. So this course is supposedly going to help me in becoming a better data analyst, which will allow me to perform even more complicated experiments. It’s not like chi square will bring you anywhere right?

EE4305 – Introduction to Fuzzy/Neural Networks
The original idea was using this course to make the computer vision course easier. But they’re at the same time, so maybe it will be helpful when I get a bit further into the course. The best thing about this course till this far is the teacher. A really helpful guy, who speaks English really good… grammar wise. His pronunciation makes ‘variable’ sound like ‘rawrble’. But I don’t foresee many problems during this course.

Traveling

[singlepic id=43 w=320 h=240 float=left]Tutorials and projects are only starting next week, so the time I spend studying is limited to the lectures I attend and the preparation I do for these lectures. I’ve had only one assignment so far, which worked out pretty ok. So what do you do when you’re in the hub of South-East Asia? You travel!

Last weekend I’ve been to Pulau Bintan in Indonesia with a couple of people I met here in Singapore. A nice mixed bunch of people. Americans, Canadians, French, Germans, Scandi’s and Dutchies all getting along just fine. We rented two huts in a place called “Shady Shacks” for really no money at all. The tickets we booked were pretty cheap too. And the entire weekend was really good.

We left on Saturday too early to be healthy and at arrival on Bintan, after about 2 hours on a ferry, we stepped ashore into the pouring rain. A bit weird, a bunch of westerners walking around in the rain looking for a place to eat. It was national day in Bintan, celebrating the liberation from the Dutch reign (at the point I found out I took of the Dutch flag draped around my shoulders), so it was really crowded on the streets. Weirdest thing would have been being flipped off by a 13 year old boy… I just assume that’s the normal way of greeting people on Bintan.

[singlepic id=41 w=320 h=240 float=left]We had an awesome dinner in the harbourtown/capital Tanjung Pinang, after which we got on 2 cabs to go to the Shady Shacks, but not before going to the supermarket for some alcohol preparation. A crate of Bintang and one of Carlsberg were supposed to keep us alive and amused throughout the rainy day. And it really didn’t stop raining, even when we got to our accomodation. But since it was still warm, we decided to bring some beers into the sea and just go around for a swim in the rain anyways. Which proved to be an awesome preparation for the dinner and after-dinner.

I have to admit I don’t remember too much of that evening, but one absolutely weird incident I have to share. While I was sitting and enjoying a beer, Chris, a friend of mine came to me with a quite surprised look on his face and asked me to come with him. Apparently this local guy called Smiley was able to read hands and found out something quite personal about Chris. So ye, scientifically educated as I am, I let him read my hand and I’m still amazed by what he concluded. “When you were young your parents made you learn how to fight”, which is absolutely true… I even remember the day my mother called a Pencak Silat school in Zwolle to have me train there, where I stuck for 8 years. Black magic apparently still exists in Indonesia. Someone care to provide me a plausible reason for this guy knowing this?

At least the next day the weather was better, which leaded to us spending the day at the beach, getting sunburns and having dinner and really not doing anything worth mentioning. Or taking any pictures worth mentioning. In retrospect, that dinner gave Sam and me a foodpoisoning, but damn those shrimps were good.

Coming weeks

I’ve decided to do less partying during the week and pay more attention to school. So this is where my rhythm is supposed to be kicking in. From now on it will be all studying and spending my time wisely. There’s still a trip to Pulau Tioman in Malaysia being planned in a few weeks. Next Saturday I’m probably going to the DMC championships.

And in the recess week, starting 22nd of September, I’ll maybe go to Thailand or Bali/Lombok… only time will tell. And for the rest, I got word from Eindhoven our weekly Intermania meetings started again. Which means that I’ll be writing a small article on how Singaporeans do not understand a damn thing of environmental psychology!

_{en ettor, alvast een haeahahehehaeaha op de spitsvondige comment die je gaat plaatsen!}