Covariance Projection

Covariance Projection is a useful tool which is frequently used in Robotics and SLAM. I wrote a small document explaining covariance projection.

It can be accessed from http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~choudhar/misc/covariance_projection.pdf.

Softwares that I use in everyday life

I am writing down the list of softwares that I use everyday. This is for my own backup and for anyone who is interested in knowing about it.

1. Eclipse IDE: I have been using Eclipse for the last one year. Before that I used to code completely in VIM but recently I have started to like Eclipse due to its capability to handle large projects smoothly.

2. Terminator: For all the other purposes like running roscore, rviz, bag files, launching code et al., I use terminator. I have a dual screen and on one screen I have eclipse and on the other screen I have terminator. Below is the screenshot of my screens.

3. Lyx: I use LyX for writing papers and I found it much better than other LaTeX editors. Writing mathematical derivations in LyX is very easy and one should definitely try it atleast once.

4. GitHub: I use Git as a version control system for all my codes and papers. You can request a free micro plan if you are a student. Right now most of my projects are in private mode and I plan to release them soon.

5. Zotero: I use Zotero to organize the research papers I read into different collections. While browsing through papers, organizing papers is as easy as bookmarking them with a single mouse click.

6. MindMup: MindMup is a free and opensource mind mapping software that I use to organize the ideas, to-do lists, papers etc. It can save the map to google drive or github.

7. ROS: If you are working in Robotics or Computer Vision, this is the thing you should know. RViz itself is sufficient reason to use ROS in your code.

8. MATLAB: I use it for all the plotting and analysis purposes. I do not experiment in MATLAB itself.

9. Miscellaneous: Other than these, some of the websites that I rely on these days is Google Calendar, GMail and Feedly

These are all the things I can remember right now. I will keep adding to the list as I remember them.

That is all for now. Cya.

Recap

Last month I was attended an awesome computer vision summer school held at UCLA and organized by IPAM. You can see the schedule at https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/schedule.aspx?pc=gss2013. Some of the nice things about this workshop was that it was fully funded by IPAM and NSF and along with that they called in a nice set of speakers like Donald Geman (of Geman and Geman fame), Stanley Osher (level sets), Yi Ma et al. to give lectures and interact with us. All the vision enthusiasts stayed together for three weeks. Other than these, we got to see a lot of places in Los Angeles as well.
This is me at Santa Monica Pier.
After all the travel, I have resumed work now. Recently I have been facing a lot of bugs, so I thought of keeping a note from now on. The most recent one is when I declared a class as a member variable of another class like:

class A:
public:
    A();

protected:
    B temp;
   

But this is not the right way, since it never constructs B. So, the right way to do so is:

class A:
public:
A():temp();

protected:
B temp;
   

This is all for now. Cya.

Creating this blog

I used jekyllbootstrap to create this blog. First create a repository on github.com using the name username.github.io (like itzsid.github.io). Then execute the following commands.

  git clone https://github.com/plusjade/jekyll-bootstrap.git USERNAME.github.io
  cd USERNAME.github.com
  git remote set-url origin https://github.com:USERNAME/USERNAME.github.io.git
  git push origin master
   

You can read my source code at https://github.com/itzsid/itzsid.github.io. My template is at: https://raw.github.com/itzsid/itzsid.github.io/master/index.md.

Hello World

As for a formal introduction, I am a PhD student in the School of Interactive Computing, which is a part of College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Here I am associated with Cognitive Robotics and BORG lab and I am being advised by Henrik I. Christensen and Frank Dellaert. My primary research interests are Computer and Robotic Vision and its intersection with Machine Learning and High Performance Computing. I am currently working in the area of autonomous navigation in known environments.