Misc

Recently, I’ve been interested in the idea of being able to afford the cost of living in California, so I’ve been looking at industry jobs. There are plenty of generic data science jobs that I am qualified for and may very well apply for, but it always seems a shame to not take advantage of the past decade I’ve spent analyzing behavior from video data, so I’m trying to track down a job in that realm, and last week I saw that this climbing startup, Belay AI, is maybe hiring soon. Being able to merge climbing and behavioral quantification would be sort of a dream job for me, so I’ve been reflecting on what computer vision has to offer climbers. I’ve spent a lot of time sorting through joint angle data and other metrics of behavior, and it’s not always straightforward to get things out beyond what is already obvious to human observers. I think it’s cool to see yourself tracked, no doubt, but what’s the actual value added?

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.