Misc

Obviously, we’re some time into the year already, but back in November, I got invited by PloS bio to review this paper on a new tracking method called BehaveAI.

My dear reader. I was not prepared for how much this paper would change my life. When I read the abstract I said to myself, “Well that’s impossible. What they’re promising is impossible.” but they fully delivered. This is maybe the most beautiful piece of tracking tech I have ever seen, it immediately solved a massive problem for us in the lab, and before the paper was even published I had completely rebuilt our tracking pipeline to implement it.

About 2 years ago, I pitched a Computer Vision workshop for biologists as part of a fellowship. I ended up getting an NSF fellowship instead, but that workshop has been bouncing around in my head for the last couple years. Finally I decided to organize it properly, started making plans, emailing participants, organized funding, and to my surprise, it actually happened, this past weekend!

I love exploration. When I was a kid, I spent most of my time wandering around the roads and woods near my house. I would leave after school on my bike and or roller blades and try to find roads parts of my neighborhood I’d never seen, or I would walk along the creek that ran though my backyard all the way to where it met the Pearl River. I still am always hoping to find new ways to get from place to place in Philly. Exploration is the best.

When I was 13 or so, I started a Livejournal. I don’t remember who got me into Livejournal, but I spent hours writing updates, working on my background, color scheme, and profile pics. (I think if you had the unpaid version you got a total of three profile picture slots. Memory was pretty sparse back then it seems.) When facebook came around, I gradually transitioned over. (I remember feeling strongly about the fact that facebook was stupid and would never catch on.) Like all of us, as Facebook got bigger, I stopped updating by livejournal, or the blogger that replaced it. And then I moved to Twitter. Oh, and then I got married, and I had someone to talk to, so I didn’t have this compulsion to write down all my thoughts on a carefully designed page. So this all feels like a return to form, albeit 18 years later.