Friday November 17, 2006

While packing to fly home tomorrow, I just found an old brochure in my bag left over from a vacation my wife and I took to Paris with my parents a few years ago. It's a brochure for the Marmottan Museum, one my favorite places from that trip.

The museum is known for three reasons: its collection of Empire furniture, art, etc., its collection of medieval sculpture, and, finally, its Monet collection. The museum has 150 Monets, donated by the artist's son. I saw the Monet show several years ago at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I enjoyed it, but it did not affect me the way the Marmottan did.

The main lower level of the museum has a floorplan in the shape of a keyhole: a long rectangular space that ends in a circular area. As I walked down the rectanglar space, the curved wall at the end began to come into view. As I stepped forward to view the entire circular space, I was stunned by the beauty of the display. In front of me was a wide, sweeping view of a series of the Giverny Nymphéas with such rich colors and patterns that it took my breath away. All I could do was sit and look. It was absolutely marvelous.

The museum is located at 2 rue Louis Boilly 75016 Paris. Next time you are in Paris, do check it out. You will not be disappointed.

I'm flying home to Providence from Tampa tomorrow morning now that Supercomputing '06 is over. I hope to blog today's two panels at some point--both were excellent. The first explored whether FPGAs might be the basis of the next big thing in HPC. The second was a very thoughtful and thought provoking discussion of the impact of multi-core processors on HPC.

In the meantime, a sunset shot to close this trip...

AMD gave away this booklet at their Supercomputing '06 booth. It's a marketing blurb and not a technical document, but it does cover the basics of the value proposition at a high level. I have a few copies if anyone (at Sun) is interested in taking a look.

I mentioned in an earlier post that researchers from the University of Houston gave a talk this past weekend at Sun's HPC Consortium meeting in Florida about remote sensing of a person's physiological and mental state. I didn't realize at the time that these technologies would be demo'ed in the Sun booth at Supercomputing '06.

I tried the infrared imaging first. There are three pieces of information that can be derived from analysis of infrared video. First, if your carotid artery (side of neck) can be imaged over time, your pulse rate can be determined. Second, if your nostrils can be imaged, then your breathing rate can be detected. I was surprised how strong and easily detected this signal is: the nostrils turn black when inhaling and red/orange when exhaling--like two lighthouse flashing in the distance. And, third, your stress level can be assessed by monitoring the temperature of the proximal regions of your eye sockets.

Me: Inhaling and apparently a little stressed though it's hard to tell with the cool shades

Another demo used two cameras and a flash to capture stereo images of show attendees. The two views are used to compute facial 3D geometry and create a polygon model. Once the face has been modeled, a database is searched to find matches with earlier scans. I was impressed with how fast this ran and with how accurate it was. One thing did seem to confuse it though: reflections on my glasses prevented good imaging near my eyes and usually resulted in a search failure. You can see a little of the reflection effect below.

Polygonal Man