Tag Archives: Teaching

Presentation on “Visual Information Retrieval”

Tomorrow I’m an invited speaker at Graz University of Technology in the course on “Applications of Knowledge Management” of Markus Strohmaier. I’ll talk about Visual Information Retrieval featuring the Semantic Gap and a round-up of low level features and indexing strategies. Looking forward to this event as I really like these overview presentations 😀

Best of compiler construction

In general one should not post errors of other … but well I just give the best answers, no questions, no names … and of course: it’s a good laugh 😀

Notation for describing graphs is not quite clear to some people. I also miss the mother nodes: […] nodes in the dependency graph are depending on father nodes, sister nodes and brother nodes […]

Asking for advantages and disadvantages of a certain approach I got within the same answer: […] advantage: program is faster, disadvantage: program would be slower […]

Please note that I assume that these answer come out of the stress of the people writing the test and not the missing knowledge.

Finding duplicate code …

I recently found myself in a scenario, where I tried to figure out how implementation clusters have been implicitly created within a group of students. All of them were given a task (with 4 sub tasks) for a whole semester. Everyone was meant to do the task alone, but collaboration was allowed. However I needed to know who helped whom and - of course - who helped whom with source code.

A colleague had a similar problem and he pointed me to PMD CPD (= PMD Copy & Paste Detector) . This tool works lightning fast and has a GUI 🙂 Also its open source -> respect!

Links:

  • http://pmd.sourceforge.net/cpd.html

Computer Games: Parallax Scrolling & Sprites

Currently I’m preparing for giving my talk next Friday in the computer games lesson on multimedia issues in games. To underline my words and slides with some code I also coded some easy little Java program visualizing sprite animation and some star field background. The coding was great fun - the third scrolling shooter I coded … always a pleasure 🙂

However there is one thing I found out while coding: Ready to use sprite animation image stripes are hard to get. There is a little tool called simple explosion maker” that came handy and the SpriteLib of Flying Yogi is rather cool, but I miss the great deal of online creative commons content. Perhaps one could point me there 🙂

Related links:

  • Simple explosion maker - A simple tool for rendering explosions.
  • SpriteLib - GPL-ed sprites of Flying Yogi

Computer games lecture update: Industry talks

As already blogged we offer this semester a course on computer game development at Klagenfurt University. Now three industry talks are confirmed:

  • Stefan Berger from  JoWooD Productions Software AG will talk about game development projects discussing aspects of conceptual work, project management specifics in game dev industry, resources, marketing and QA.
  • Andreas Olipitz from OSIOS Online Platforms GmbH will talk about multiplayer games on the browser platform. OSIOS develops such a multiplayer game: Project Deep Space.
  • Microsoft will also send a speaker and has sponsored an XBox for the best student project.

All the talks as well as the presentation of the students projects will take place on June 20, 2008. If you are somewhere around Klagenfurt and you like to join us (without being enrolled) drop me a mail in advance 🙂

Courses in Summer Semester 2008

Semester started yesterday and therefore also the courses. This semester I’m lecturer and coordinator for 3 courses:

  • Multimedia Information Systems - My very own course focusing on Multimedia Retrieval and content based analysis. Takes place 2nd time now, was quite a success the first time: Students and me were satisfied with the agenda of the course and the project results. Find more about it here.
  • PR Compiler Construction - A practical course on the basics of compilers to support the compiler construction lecture. There is also a tutorial helping with the implementation tasks of the practical course. Find more information here.
  • Computer Games - A first try with my colleague Horst Pichler to create a new course on computer game development bringing together the knowledge of the faculty. While we only had 30 free places in the course and the first lesson will be next week we expect ~ 90 students, which is quite a lot for not mandatory courses in Klagenfurt. Find out more here.