PhD on John Stowers

A Change

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:15:32 +0000

2011 has been an interesting year. Between the stupid earthquakes and the pressure of finishing my PhD, I have been silent because I have had nothing interesting to talk about (cf. twitter…).

But there is a light at the end, I’m on track to complete my thesis, ‘Biologically Inspired Visual Control of Flying Robots’, in December/January.

I’m excited to say that I have accepted a job at the Institute of Molecular pathology , in a research group studying the mechanisms of visual flight control in insects. Technology wise, it is a perfect fit; the experimental apparatus involves a multi-camera real-time flight tracking system and estimator for multiple targets in an augmented reality flight arena. It is open-source (ish), and python/numpy. Research wise, it allows me to investigate some of the assumptions and unknowns in the biomimetic control systems I implemented during my PhD. And it is in Vienna, 1st Feb, 2012!

Interfacing Python + C + OpenCV via ctypes

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:01:48 +0000

I was recently asked to help a colleague access his image processing C-library from python; quite a common task. As those of you who are familiar with Python might realise, there are a whole bag of ways that this can be accomplished;

In this case the colleague only needed to access a single function from the library returning image data, and then hand this result onto OpenCV. One happy side effect of the new (> v2.1) python-opencv bindings is that they do no validation on CvImage.SetData , which means you can pass an arbitrary string/pointer. Because of this I advised him I thought using something like SWIG was overkill, and he could just write a wrapper to his library using ctypes, or a thin python extension directly.

One Month In France

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 11:29:04 +0000

ENAC

Hi Everyone, Its been a long time between blogging but I have an excuse. I have moved from Christchurch New Zealand , to ENAC , Toulouse, France . I have now been here for a month, working with the UAV team here.

Screen Envy?

The work has been really challenging, and I have settled into my routine, working towards some things I would like to demonstrate before I leave. I have spent a few weeks doing a lot of electronics design, updating the paparazzi autopilot board, the IMU, and the GPS boards. Nothing revolutionary, just some evolutionary improvements over the previous hardware.

Frantic

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:22:38 +0000

Frantic would be how I described my last two weeks. I have had very little free time to work on Conduit. Everything seems to have come at once!

I got accepted for summer of code - adding SyncML support to Conduit.
Alexandre Inacio Rosenfeld also got accepted to SOC to work on Ipod and media support in Conduit.
I got accepted to speak at GUADEC , which I will be attending, providing all finances work out.

Why Engineering and FOSS is Satisfying

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:56:34 +0000

I recently came across the post; why student programmers rant about business students with ideas . Putting my ideological belief in FOSS aside, I think it eloquently describes why I chose to return and pursue a PhD after a year spent studying engineering management (like an MBA - for those North American folks).

I also think it is highly applicable to FOSS. Many successful FOSS projects are born from engineers, the ‘decision to execute’ has already been made. As the article mentions, _’leadership and the ability to make decisions _is valuable, but only in groups with realizable ability to execute’. As a FOSS project evolves, the (normal?) combination of a BFDL and the constant freedom to fork keep the project relatively free of the ownership style disputes described in the post.