TITLE: You Know You're Doing Important Work...
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 20, 2008 2:55 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
... when
Charlie Eppes
invokes your research area on
Numb3rs.
In the episode I saw last Friday, the team used a
recommender system,
among other snazzy techie glitz, to track down a Robin Hood
who was robbing from the dishonestly rich and giving to the
poor through a collection of charities. A
colleague of mine
does work in recommender systems and collaborative filtering,
so I thought of him immediately. His kind of work has
entered the vernacular now.
I don't recall the Numb3rs crew ever referring to
knowledge-based systems or task-specific architectures,
which was my area in the old days. Nor do I remember any
references to design patterns or to programming language
topics, which is where I have spent my time in the last
decade or so. Should I feel left out?
But Charlie and
Amita
did use the idea of
steganography
in an
episode two years ago,
to find a pornographic image hidden inside an ordinary image.
I have given talks on steganography on campus occasionally in
the last couple of years. The first time was at a
conference on camouflage,
and most recently I spoke to a graphic design class, earlier
this month. (My next engagement is at UNI's Saturday Science
Showcase, a public outreach lecture series my college runs in
the spring.) So I feel like at least some of my intellectual
work has been validated.
Coincidentally, I usually bill my talks on this topic as
"Numb3rs Meets The Da Vinci Code: Information
Masquerading as Art", and one of the demonstrations I do is
to hide an
image of Numb3rs guys
in a digitized version of the
Mona Lisa.
The talk is a lot of fun for me, but I wonder if college kids
these days pay much attention to network television, let alone
da Vinci's art.
Lest you think that only we nth-tier researchers care
to have our areas trumpeted in the pop world, even the great
ones can draw such pleasure. Last spring,
Grady Booch
gave a
keynote address at SIGCSE.
As a part of his opening, he played for us a clip from a TV
show that had brightened his day, because it mentioned, among
other snazzy techie glitz, the Unified Modeling Language he
had helped to create. Oh, and that
video clip
came from... Numb3rs!
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