Thursday the 4th of December I gave a presentation at the Secret Labs AngularJS event. In case you’ve missed out the entire event is on youtube! #worldofincentro
Tag: presentation
Autumn has come
It has been a while since my last post and a lot has happened since then. I finished my thesis, we started mixing our demo, visited Crete, went to the Haarlem Jamborette, danced at the Folkwoods festival and enjoyed the Lowlands festival as well. Last but not least I started working. But, first things first.
As you all might know my thesis was about Narrative Generation in the context of tourism.After the application was finished I started working on some experiments. I arranged a few test persons who were willing to test my application. Meanwhile I started writing my thesis. Once there were test results I added them to the thesis and I delivered the first concept. One week afterwards I handed in my final version. On the first of July I had to defend my thesis. I survived and was graduated, I only had to wait till the 22 of September to be allowed to call myself “Master of Science”.
The Saturday after my thesis defence we played as support for Trip Trigger. We had a great show but after we finished I had to go home because I was completely broken.
A few days later I flew with my girlfriend to the wonderful island of Crete. The temperature over there was 30 degrees Celsius, a lot nicer than it was at that point of time in the Netherlands. We stayed there for two weeks and saw most of the island. We rented a car to be more flexible. On our flight back an unpleasant surprise awaited because we were not on the passengers list of our plane, which is very strange indeed. Luckily we were allowed to board 20 minutes before the plane left. (We arrived 3 hours before the plane left)
After the holiday I went, together with 21 other people of my Scouting group, to the Haarlem Jamborette. I will not go into detail here but this were 11 amazing days with a lot of fun, sun, rain and enthusiasm of as well the organisation as well as the participants. I’ve met a lot of nice people from all different countries and everybody was having a great time over there.
My festival season this year was the same as the previous years, which means first the Folkwoods festival and then A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise. I’ve seen a lot of great artists, a few highlights: Elbow, Within Temptation and Seth Lakeman.
So it has been a very busy summer and that’s not all. The first of September I started working at VLC, a Dutch consulting company in Enterprise Information Management (EIM). I started as a Young Professional in the Young Professional Academy, and in a week from now I’ll be known as a Web Content Management Consultant. So in future there will be slightly more posts on EIM.
Yours.
Last lecture
Yesterday I had my last college on the University of Amsterdam, we needed to present our projects for Intelligent Interactive Systems. The real last lecture we had was the day before yesterday and it had a beautiful conclusion that suits to my study:
“Humans should not become more machine, machines should become more human.”
Narrative generation
Last week I read a lot of interesting literature for my thesis. I divided the subject into separate concepts and looked for papers and books on each concept. One of the concepts is representation.
Representation
When it comes to the presentation of a story in images there must be a source for these images. The Internet is, by far, one of the biggest sources but very unusable. So lets first setup the requirements. I want:
- Geo-tags
- User-tags and/or description
- An API
The geo-tags are used to define the location of the picture, the user-tags are used for the rest of the image description. The API is important because without one it will be very hard to get the images and information.
With these requirements I start looking at several image collections on the web. Some notable collections include: Picasa, Panoramio, Flickr, DeviantArt, Photobucket and probably more. The reason for including DeviantArt is because it can be interesting to show modified images. But how nice that might be they lack an important feature just as Photobucket, namely they do not use geo-tags. The ones remaining are Picasa, Panoramia and Flickr, but with respect to the large collection that Picasa offers they do not have an API that suits to my needs.
So my conclusion is that there are globally two sources of picures that contain location data (GEO-tags), user-tags and have an API. These are Panoramio and Flickr. I will only use one of these. Both have advantages as Flickr is a widely accepted choice. But with respect to Flickr, when I just take a look at the amount of pictures available for the Netherlands Panoramio seems to have a lot more images. Besides this Panoramio also is included in Google Maps so this also can be seen as a kind of acceptance. Because this research takes place in the Netherlands, and more specific in North-Holland, I will use Panoramio.