This post was originally appeared on my previous blog.
Before I write an overview of 2012, I thought it would be nice to write about some highlights of the previous year.
I graduated in November 2010 with a thesis titled “Random Subspace Method for One-Class Classifiers“. This is me with my diploma:
After going on vacation and celebrating the start of 2011, my first official working day was on the 3rd of January 2011. Now my job was to work on a different pattern recognition topic: Dissimilarity-based Multiple Instance Learning.
However, for a while I still continued working on my MSc subject in order to write a paper for Multiple Classifier Systems 2011. The paper “Pruned Random Subspace Method for One-Class Classifiers” (as you can guess, the regular method was not good enough) was accepted for presentation!
In June we went to Naples, Italy for the MCS 2011 conference. Here is an impression of me presenting:
Here is an impression of the conference lunch:
Besides the great food, wine and weather I really really enjoyed the conference. I finally got to meet the people behind all the papers I have been citing and I got a feel for the type of community that all these people formed. After the conference, we had a few days to see more of Naples, the Vesuvius volcano and the ruins of Pompei.
As my next project, I helped with a journal paper that a colleague of mine was writing, “Bridging Feature and Structure Representations in Graph Matching”. Without getting into too many details, we wanted to classify objects that are represented as attributed graphs, while varying the importance of the attributes (features) or the actual graph structure. We investigated two ways to do this: using a graph edit distance and using graph kernels, which was my part. Besides learning a lot about graph kernels, I really enjoyed this project because of the regular meetings and discussions and my responsibility to the other people involved.
In September, it was time to go to Italy again, now for the Similarity-based Pattern Recognition Workshop (SIMBAD) 2011 in Venice. My supervisor presented the paper “Bag Dissimilarities for Multiple Instance Learning”, which is also what most of my current work is about. Unfortunately, I was very ill during the conference, so I didn’t have such a good conference and sightseeing experience as in Naples.
Next to research, some of my time was spent on education. I followed courses on topics related to image processing and bioinformatics, and also did the online Machine Learning course, which was very helpful. I also got to experience education from a different side a little bit while assisting in Pattern Recognition courses for PhD students and for people from industry.
In the end of the year, I had my go/no-go presentation and I received a go, together with a lot of helpful advice on how to improve my work. The main points were to become more comfortable with mathematics, be more precise in why I’m pursuing a certain direction in research, and to improve my presentation skills.