[reading rec] Sun, stone and shadows : 20 great Mexican short stories / edited by Jorge F. Hernández. 2008. ISBN 9789681685942 Author selections : Mexican authors born during the first half of the twentieth century. The organization is neat -- by amorphous themes -- "fantastic unreal" etc. 1/

[reading rec] The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson, 2012. ISBN 978-0812992793. Set in N Korea, an orphan -- who may not be an orphan! -- makes his way in a difficult world. Themes of propaganda and creation of conflicting constraints on thinking & behavior. Reality and identity.

Secret to a successful research career: 1. Get super lucky and have the stars align for your first year 2. Repeat ~40 times 3. Retire

[reading rec] Every Good Boy Does Fine: A Love Story, in Music Lessons by pianist Jeremy Denk (2022). ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812995985 I saw Denk perform, of all places, Purdue U, w Joshua Bell (violin). The book is fantastic -- mix of autobiography, musical analysis, piano playing. 1/

I finished reading Enriquez's _A Sunny Place for Shady People_. I had a tough time getting into the earlier stories in the collection but loved the later ones. Next, I am looking for the Enriquez's other short story collection, _The Dangers of Smoking in Bed_.

‘My Work Doesn’t Define Me,’ Says Man Who Will Spend 90,000 Hours Of Lifetime At Office

My wonderfully weird children are back in school as of today, ahhhh quiet again 🫠

[reading rec] Mariana Enriquez, _Things We Lost in the Fire: Stories_, trans. from Spanish by Megan McDowell. Original is _Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego_, 2016. Literary fiction / horror stories that I still think about ... despite reading this collection a few years ago.

One of my PhD students got their visa revoked. I know of other cases amongst my AI colleagues. This is not what investing in US leadership in AI looks like. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/...

VSLAM-LAB: A Comprehensive Framework for Visual SLAM Methods and Datasets Alejandro Fontan, Tobias Fischer, Javier Civera, Michael Milford tl;dr: arxiv.org/abs/2504.04457

The AI for Science summer school, coorganized by CNRS and U of Chicago will be in Paris, June 30th to july 4th, register asap if you want attend! datascience.uchicago.edu/events/ai-sc...

Mrs. Blackbird looking for nesting material. Have a great day☕🖖 #Amsel #blackbird 📷 🌿 🪶 🐦 #Nikon #Fotografie #naturephotography #photography #birds #wildlife

One of the perfect da share zone memes 🤌

Just received the first volume, and damn, clearly a ton of effort was put into it! There's a ~90 page intro to "foundations of complexity science" (which is also sold separately). (The super interesting) papers each have a 5-10 page intro with historical context, and are full of annotations ❤️

MP-SfM: Monocular Surface Priors for Robust Structure-from-Motion Zador Pataki, @pesarlin.bsky.social Johannes L. Schonberger, @marcpollefeys.bsky.social tl;dr: using monodepth to reconstruct w/o co-visible triplets. Many ablations and details. M3Dv2 FTW demuc.de/papers/patak...

🔥🔥🔥 CV Folks, I have some news! We're organizing a 1-day meeting in center Paris on June 6th before CVPR called CVPR@Paris (similar as NeurIPS@Paris) 🥐🍾🥖🍷 Registration is open (it's free) with priority given to authors of accepted papers: cvprinparis.github.io/CVPR2025InPa... Big 🧵👇 with details!

Welcome to our world Riona! We lost Inca the Rottweiler at 8 years old about a month ago. It didn't feel right, to be at home with no dog, and I missed inca terribly. We found Riona the Rottweiler at an SPCA and she is a gem. Nikon z6ii, f/1.8, 1/400s, ISO4000, 50mm, handheld.

Fixing the RANSAC Stopping Criterion Johannes Schönberger, Viktor Larsson, @marcpollefeys.bsky.social tl;dr: ratio between the number of all-inlier samples and the number of possible samples->fix the approximate probability in RANSAC arxiv.org/abs/2503.07829

AnyCalib: On-Manifold Learning for Model-Agnostic Single-View Camera Calibration Javier Tirado-Garín, Javier Civera tl;dr: FOV field parameterization >> Perspective field. Sota on focal length estimation arxiv.org/abs/2503.12701

A Framework for Reducing the Complexity of Geometric Vision Problems and its Application to Two-View Triangulation with Approximation Bounds Felix Rydell @bokmangeorg.bsky.social @fredkahl.bsky.social Kathlén Kohn tl;dr:cool for triangulation,won't pretend I got the math arxiv.org/abs/2503.08142

8-Calves Image dataset Xuyang Fang, Sion Hannuna, Neill Campbell tl;dr: 1 hour video of 8 calves. + some object detector & classifier eval arxiv.org/abs/2503.13777

This morning I woke up at 6 to spend some time in Jurong before going to work. Hoping to finally find the black bittern... Well, the bittern remained hidden, but hornbills came and said hello!

This has only been possible through NIH funding. Funding biomedical science through the NIH has been one of the greatest accomplishments of the United States of America for America, and for the world. We are ALL better for the work that passionate scientists funded by the NIH have been able to do.

This is so evil that it defies understanding. A transplant surgeon on an H1B visa was deported, despite a court injunction. She had committed no crimes. This must stop. We must stand together to protect immigrants and visitors against state terrorism. www.providencejournal.com/story/news/l...

[book recommendation] tidying up, I picked up my copy of _The Old Drift_, Namwali Serpell, 2019, ISBN 9781101907146. A fantastic book, set in Zambia over a century. Historical fiction & science fiction; racism, disease, technology, gov't control all collide.

I am so angry about what is happening in the US, and to Columbia University students. The US government are entrapping students, lying about them, upending their whole lives. "The department [of Homeland Security] did not provide any evidence for its allegations." www.nytimes.com/2025/03/15/n...

Excellent post from (my former😢 colleague) Nicholas Carlini on the differences between copyright law & privacy research. In particular, from a privacy perspective, "was training data memorized?" is a yes/no question; we aren't trying to quantify how much data was memorized beyond "some" vs "none".

Trump: COLUMBA IS AWFUL Columbia: [slaps student] Trump: COLUMBIA IS ANTISEMITIC Columbia: [kicks student in groin] Trump: NO MONEY FOR COLUMBIA LOL Columbia: [punches brown student in nose] Trump: WE WILL CLOSE COLUMBIA Columbia: [reaching for another student] okay this time it will work

I'm sight-reading some Scarlatti sonatas -- inspired by a new CD of Scarlatti I'm listening to. These sonatas are *so wonderfully weird*. Usually, Scarlatti has lots of || 3rds, here || 6ths & big jumps -- 2 8ves in l.h.. Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonata in F major, K.366 Scott Ross youtu.be/olf197Fh2gQ

Fixing the RANSAC Stopping Criterion Johannes Schönberger, Viktor Larsson, @marcpollefeys.bsky.social tl;dr: original RANSAC formula for number of iterations underestimates for hard cases and overestimates for easy. Here is corrected one -> better results arxiv.org/abs/2503.07829

Red Fox pouncing on prey. It's always fun watching the subjects we photograph while they hunt. Many times they miss... but sometimes they come up with what they were after... as was the case in this instance. #wildlifephotography #redfox #fox #naturephotography

Feeling frustrated about the aid situation to Ukraine, I donated to Come Back Alive recently and they have some neat artwork when doing so. savelife.in.ua/en/

Explaining Human Preferences via Metrics for Structured 3D Reconstruction @jacklangerman.bsky.social Denys Rozumnyi, Yuzhong Huang, @ducha-aiki.bsky.social tl;dr: we asked 3D modelers to rank wireframe reconstructions & compared it to ranking by metrics. Observations🧵 1/ arxiv.org/abs/2503.08208

“Beyond Measure” by @jjvincent.bsky.social is an awesome book. I highly recommend it. It’s not just about history, but a deeper reflection on all the social implications of the act of measuring.

*Please repost* @sjgreenwood.bsky.social and I just launched a new personalized feed (*please pin*) that we hope will become a "must use" for #academicsky. The feed shows posts about papers filtered by *your* follower network. It's become my default Bluesky experience bsky.app/profile/pape...

MUSt3R: Multi-view Network for Stereo 3D Reconstruction Yohann Cabon, Lucas Stoffl, Leonid Antsfeld, Gabriela Csurka, Boris Chidlovskii, Jerome Revaud, @vincentleroy.bsky.social tl;dr: DUST3R for visual odometry - "just concatenate" (c) Amazing arch simplicity arxiv.org/pdf/2503.01661 #CVPR2025

Image-Based Relocalization and Alignment for Long-Term Monitoring of Dynamic Underwater Environments Beverley Gorry, Tobias Fischer, Michael Milford, Alejandro Fontan tl;dr: SuperPoint +LightGlue can breath underwater. arxiv.org/abs/2503.04096

Carolina Wren, top, and female Downy Woodpecker, bottom. These two birds don't usually share space ... but this feeder is so desirable, that the birds have gotten more and more tolerant of each other close by over time. At home. Nikon z6ii, f/8. 1/500s, ISO1600, 410mm, tripod & gimbal.

Female N. Cardinal at home. Nikon z6ii, f/8. 1/640s, ISO2000, 380mm, tripod & gimbal.

"What Ketamine does to the Human Brain," Shayla Love, Atlantic, gift link -- h/t Today in Tabs I read this a couple days ago & can't stop thinking about it when I see yet more Elon Musk antics. www.theatlantic.com/health/archi...

We have extended the deadline for paper submission for Image Matching Workshop. Anything image matching or 3D reconstruction related is welcomed Now it is March 17 @cvprconference.bsky.social #CVPR2025 image-matching-workshop.github.io

It is pointless, but. My US friends - it will not stop after 4 years with next elections. Either you stop it yourself in some way, or there will be no fair elections next time. Democracy is fragile. P.S. If you like what is going on - enjoy.

Mom's new heifer calf: she escaped from her enclosure this evening -- the kids, Mom, and I tried to corral her and she is FAST. She did multiple laps, finally got tired, & I was able to approach & fashion a halter out of a lead. Nikon z6ii, f/3.2, 1/320s, ISO 1250, 50mm, handheld.

"The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) issued a stay, ordering the USDA to return the fired workers to their jobs for 45 days while an investigation continues." www.npr.org/2025/03/05/n...

it would be great if we had a democratic party willing to go out and say “this is an insane lie to get you to irrationally hate a minority group trying to just exist peacefully” rather than start throwing us under the bus and twiddling their thumbs

Two pets with similar poses: Inca the Rottie on the ground, M. the guinea pig on the towel. Inca met guinea pigs late in life and she has been very good around them so far. However, we had a squirrel get in the house (long story), she wanted to eat the squirrel, and helped with its capture.

Just found a new winner for the most hype-baiting, unscientific plot I have seen. (From the recent Figure AI release)

Gang of herons riding a boat in Lower Seletar Reservoir: grey heron, intermediate heron and little egrets.