Keyboard shortcuts to add date and time in Excel

It seems simple, but I was doing it by typing the current date and time "by hand" in a Excel worksheet cells. It was not efficient. There should be a quicker way to do it! And there is. Through the use of keyboard shortcuts:

• Enter the current date: CTRL+SHIFT+";"
• Enter the current time: CTRL+SHIFT+":"

LTouchIt

A couple of months ago my master student Daniel Mendes defended his thesis with honorable success (19/20). In his master work he developed an interactive tabletop LEGO modelling application (LTouchIt), which has been presented at the ACE 2011 conference. Below is a short video demonstrating the prototype.



For further details on this project, check the papers:

• "Hands-on Interactive Tabletop LEGO Application"
  Daniel Mendes, Pedro Lopes, Alfredo Ferreira
  Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, November 2011
• "Evaluation of 3D Object Manipulation on Multi-touch Surfaces Using Unconstrained Viewing Angles"
  Daniel Mendes and Alfredo Ferreira
  Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6949, pp. 523-526, September 2011

EG 3DOR 2012

The fifth Eurographics workshop on 3D Object Retrieval (EG3DOR'12) will be take place on May 13, 2012 in Caliari (Italy), as a co-event of the 33rd Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics 2012). I am program chair of this event, together with Alexander Bronstein from Tel-Aviv University. Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit original and unpublished research and practical applications in all areas of 3D Object Retrieval.

3DORuS web page published

I am the principal investigator of the 3DORuS: 3D Object Retrieval using Skecthes project, funded by Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT). This project focus on interfaces for 3D object retrieval and started in March 2010. After a few delays, we made now available online the 3DORuS project webpage. Feel free to visit it and give us some feedback.

Eurodoc 2011

I've just attended the Eurodoc 2011 conference at Vilnius, where I present the talk "PhD research dissemination on a connected work",focusing the advantages that can be taken from social media to disseminate research work.

Congratulations to the organizers for the superb event. Keep on the good work.

LTouchIt at the WSCG 2011

We will present a full paper at the International Conferences in Central Europe on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Computer Vision (WSCG) about the preliminary work on a virtual LEGO modeler for multi-touch surfaces - LTouchIt. The LTouchIt project is a follow-up of the LSketchIt project, which focused on virtual LEGO modeling using calligraphic interfaces and 3D retrieval.

Using LTouchIt to create a LEGO model

Matrix Calculation Online

I regularly need to perform matrix operations. Since I do not always have my calculator with me, and using Matlab for that is like killing a mosquito with a bazooka, I turned to an online tool that provides all matrix operations I need. The BlueBit Online Matrix Calculator is fast, easy to use and is available on a browser near you. I strongly recommend it.

Make notes (and more...) on PDF's

I often need to review documents sent to me in PDF format. Since I own a Tablet-PC, not to take advantage of the calligraphic interface for that is not an option. For years I have used the Adobe Acrobat Professional v6.0 for that purpose. However, the version 6.0 was not clearly designed to be used with a pen and we have no license for newer versions (currently 9.0). Thus, I tried a few other tools and concluded that, in my opinion, the Grahl PDF Annotator is the best option to make notes on PDF documents.

T-b3DR online again

After a long down-time due to server problems, the Thesaurus-based 3D Object Retrieval (T-b3DR) webpage is again online. Among other stuff, you can find there some interisting utilities that were develepod during my PhD thesis (and after).

JLF Lab

I am currently involved in the "João Lourenço Fernandes" (JLF) Lab at IST Taguspark. In this lab are develop research on immersive and virtual reality, multimodal and new interaction paradigms, amongs some other topics. In the picture below you can see me wearing the Natural Point tracking suit (hat included), holding the SqueezyBall 6-DOF wireless interaction device and the e-Magin HMD glasses.

ACM MM 3DOR 2010

Last week I attended the International Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval, a co-event of ACM Multimedia 2010. This workshop brought together researchers from different fields, ranging from computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning and human-computer interaction, whose works relates to 3D object retrieval.

Although all work presented in this forum was relevant to my research, I was particularly interested in the paper "Local Visual Patch for 3D Shape Retrieval" by Mohamed Daoudi et.al. and the poster "A Benchmark for Best View Selection of 3D Objects" by Afzal Godil et.al.

Blog posting resumed

"AFJ's PhD" blog was created in November 2004 to report on-line the status of my PhD work. After finishing his PhD in July 2009, the posting was suspended. However, after several requests, I decided to reactivate the blog. The renewed "AFJ's PhD and after" blog will provide information on my work as a researcher in INESC-ID and my activities as a Assistant Professor at IST/TULisbon.

DONE!!!

It was more than a month ago, but just now I had time to post here the announcement: my PhD thesis defense went very good. I finally got my PhD. It is done!

Tomorrow is the "D" Day

Yep, is tomorrow. The "D" (from defense - PhD thesis defense) day is coming fast. For more info take a look at official announcement.

LaTeX: Keeping capitals in bibliography

The bibtex was removing capital letters from paper reference that I wanted to keep. It took me a little bit to figure out a solution. But I think it might be useful, so I post it below. First I present the original bibtex entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{

(...)
TITLE = "ION Framework - A Simulation Environment for Worlds with Virtual Agent",
(...)
}

The result was:

(...) Ion framework - A simulation environment for worlds with virtual agents (...)

The solution was to add brackets to the field as shown below:


@INPROCEEDINGS{
(...)
TITLE = "{ION Framework - A Simulation Environment for Worlds with Virtual Agent}",
(...)
}

And it worked fine:

(...) ION framework - A simulation environment for worlds with virtual agents (...)

Draft submitted!

Finally the final draft of my PhD thesis was submitted. Now the jury will review it and, based on their comments, I will prepare the final version. If everything runs smoothly, the thesis defense should be in next July.

The importance of a good adviser...

After a long time wandering among several charts to represent some experimental data, I was completely stuck. None depicts the data clearly, neither illustrates the idea I want to transmit. When I was almost giving up and using an awful 3D chart, my adviser comes to see what I was doing, while drinking his after-lunch coffee and in a glimpse just solves my problem. "Do not complicate. Use two 2D charts!" - he said. Obviously he was right. Simple solution.

"Damn! Why didn't I think about that before? "

Anyway, it worked fine and the two charts below express well what I intend.

Shape pool statistics tool

To help me while analysing the behaviour of the shape pool produced by the CAS/HFP decomposition algorithm, I developed a small tool. This tool, whose screenshot is depicted below, compares two shape pools and provides important information about them.

Screenshot of shape pool statistics tool

Web page with PhD work

I don't know why I took so much time to create a web page about my PhD research. However, it's better late than never, so I have just created one. It's not complete, but it is a beginning.

Visit the web page of my PhD research, which focused on Thesaurus-based 3D Shape Retrieval, T-b3DR for short. There you can find some information about my work and a couple of useful prototypes.

LaTeX equation editor

I've been using a very useful tool for writing equations in LaTeX. Although it is quite easy to found on the internet, I notice that some of my colleagues did not know about it. Thus, I thought it might be a good idea to publicise it here.

So, if you're using LaTeX you should give a look at the LaTeX equation editor. It is simple, fast, and accurate. And you do not need to install anything, it runs on your web browser.