Shane's Blog » Uni

Google Scholar

Shane — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:48:49 +0000

I must say, having been a long time CiteSeer user, Google Scholar is a real breath of fresh air. It is yet another academic search interface, although this time its done right (unlike Rexa which is waaaay too inaccurate). Its a great interface and you can actually find whatever your looking for, its quite amazing!

Library support is on the way, too. At the moment though, I could only find the National Library of Australia and Deakin University, but the level of integration is very promising.

Tip: Maintaining your BibTeX reference database can be a pain sometimes. When using Google Scholar, make sure you enable BibTeX export in the preferences, it will save you heaps of time. Even when you already have the PDF, it is easy to do quick search, click “Import into BibTeX” then the entry into copy & paste into your .bib file. There is a slight bug with the field “authors” instead of “author” but that is easy to fix on the fly.

WEKA in Jython or even C#

Shane — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 04:43:31 +0000

I was very excited to find out that Python scripts can access Java APIs if you run on them Jython interpreter. Jython is a Python interpretor written in Java which some people have put to good use for fast prototyping of WEKA applications. I built a simple classifier using Jython and weka classes and everything seemed to be going fine. However, complications arose when trying to use databases jython. My intention was to use a sqlite database, but while databases work really well in standard python (or ‘CPython’) via the DB-API2, this is lost in the move to Jython. The web points to zxJDBC which has now been integrated into Jython, but it suffers from being a wrapper for JDBC that feels like a DB-API2 object… meaning you have to install JDBC drivers and all sorts.

On the .NET side of things, apparently IKVM (part of the Mono project), allows programmers to use Java APIs into their .NET applications, so maybe there is some hope for using Weka and .NET. BTW don’t forget there are heaps of free great development tools around if you are taking the .NET path.

Update: Ok it turns out that although zxJDBC is a part of Jython now, it is still not included in the Gentoo package

C# Programming

Shane — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 03:19:37 +0000

Recently I have been playing with C#/.NET programming. I’m quite impressed with the C# language, it is definitely an improvement on C++ and Java. One of my favourite features is get/set properties. As a FIT student at Monash you are entitled to use the Microsoft Visual Studio development tools. However if this does not cover you, you could try Visual Studio Express, a cut-down version that will be free for 1 year. Another option is to install SharpDevelop, a free IDE for developing .NET applications in C# and VB.NET. I am really impressed with the quality of SharpDevelop, I think you could easily use this as a development platform. All that is required is the .NET Framework and .NET Framework SDK. I’m not sure if it works with Mono though.

Microsoft and Oracle have released free editions of their database products, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition and Oracle 10g Express Edition. This is probably in response to the popularity of powerful open source databases such as MySql. The Express Editions are cut down versions of the enterprise products, and as such Microsoft’s doesn’t include the data mining tools.

LaTeX Tip: Make Purdy Links

Shane — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:46:53 +0000

Here is a tip for making those papers easier to read. If you are using LaTeX for your documents, you may like hyperref.sty, which allows you to have hypertext like links in your LaTeX generated PDF documents.

Binary data loading in Java

Shane — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 07:03:14 +0000

I need to get something off my chest: DataInputStream.readFloat(), I hate you!! Today I had one of those annoying bugs pop up that are hard to chase down. I know how to read/write my binary IEEE754 floats in C (all tested and working) but my Java code is really not liking it. Turns out readFloat() doesn’t actually know how to read a float at all. hmm. Oh well, here is the code to load yourself:
bits = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 32; i += 8 ) bits |= (int) dis.read() << i; data[w][h] = Float.intBitsToFloat(bits);

The Joys of Gentoo

Shane — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 00:56:59 +0000

Apparently you are supposed to run the etc-update command regularly to keep your Gentoo Linux system healthy. hmm. This was likely the reason for my udev dying a couple of weeks ago. I must say – I’m less impressed with Gentoo now! Oh well, emerge is still the best package management system I’ve seen so I might just fix my partions and reinstall in 32-bit mode Gentoo Linux this Wednesday at the MITS Install Day.

Encyclopedia

Shane — Mon, 13 Sep 2004 01:33:35 +0000

Nice! My article has been accepted for publication in the Encyclopedia of Data Warehousing and Mining

Australian AI03

Shane — Sat, 06 Dec 2003 10:09:26 +0000

I attended Australian AI03 this week where I presented my paper. The conference was held in Perth, which is a lovely city, at the University of WA. UWA has stunning architecture. The presentation went well and I was asked a few questions from the audience

Another paper

Shane — Sat, 23 Aug 2003 10:12:13 +0000

My latest paper has been accepted at the 16th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence which will be held in Perth 3-5th December. This paper is titled ‘A Case Study in Feature Invention for Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using X-Ray Scatter Images’ and looks at some preliminary work using data mining on X-ray diffraction data in an attempt to classify cancerous and normal breast tissue. More information can be found here.

Data Mining Winter School

Shane — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 10:14:11 +0000

I have just finnished attending the Data Mining Winter School held at Monash. There was a great list of speakers presenting over the three days, including the world renouned Dr. Usama Fayyad of DigiMine (now Revenue Science/DMX Group). It really was eye opening to hear what the leaders in the field see happening in the future.

Paper Accepted

Shane — Sat, 24 May 2003 10:15:12 +0000

We have been accepted to the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. This paper represents some of the findings developed further from my Honours research in 2002. The conference is to be held in Washington DC in August! More details are available from the research section of this website.