Here is the first and the last trophy I got from UTAR:

Too bad we didn’t had any photo session for ourselves. We were just thinking about our bed in home after the competition.

Another commercial product which is similar to our FYP.

Here is the description for this product from Microsoft’ man:

AT&T just launched a great new service to keep an eye on your little ones when they’re not with you. The new application dubbed “FamilyMap” allows parents to track their child’s whereabouts anytime via AT&T’s location framework. Parents will give their children an AT&T device, then login to the FamilyMap web site for viewing where their children are on a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. The portal has a number of features such as schedules, history and places considered safe for the children. All of this information can be slapped onto a Virtual Earth map chalked full of map data, aerial image and photography, but perhaps most crucially in this circumstance our high resolution Bird’s Eye photography which really illustrates an area of interest by providing an angled view of a location for additional context.

I have bolded some key points up there. Those features are almost the same in our FYP. But we did extra work, we even support tracking multiple object+real time.

Oh, it is NOT FREE. In one hand Verizon Chaperone is the most expensive, costing $9.99 per month and per child. In the other hand, Sprint cut its Family Locator price by half in November 2008 (read more here), allowing the location of up to 4 phones for only $5 per month.

Maybe parents should consider ours’.

(What am I doing with the DV???)

OK, here were the things I (perhaps “we”) have done in last 7 days.

Start with last Wednesday, we were doing….ok…i admit I didn’t work anything on parallel processing assignment, my group members did it. Then Friday, AAI assignment….but that day totally wasted…..nothing was done…..then Saturday went to the worst PC Fair ever….and bought this:

Sunday, AAI again..from morning to night…but luckily there was something that can show to our lecturer…then do report till late night. Now I can predict share market closing price

Morning, skip whole day. Received FYP report from supervisor in the afternoon, then start modifying till late night again. Oh shit, Tuesday has parallel processing test as well. That time my brain was like running parallel process…

Tuesday morning, present AAI. We’re the first group of the day to present. 12pm, filled up imagine cup’s registration form. Then we receive a phone call from our supervisor. He told us that we will be presenting our project in the FYP Competition the next day (yesterday). FYI, that time we haven’t gone through the final testing of our system.

Then study for test until 4pm. 5pm come out then go to printing shop to print out our FYP report. After dinner at Murni SS2, I reached home at 8.30pm. Then start doing FYP competition presentation slide which is only 10 slides. Then testing and integrating and fixing (critical problem that almost ruin the whole project) the system until the next morning.

Then Wednesday 2pm, competition started. We thought the system was well prepared. BUT…. All problems that can appear has appeared when I was showing the demo of our system. Then after we’re back to our seat, the system works like charm, without single modification….WTH….The feeling was like 注定要你死….

The famous Murphy’s law is proven yet again:

Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

We’re the worst team in terms of demoing the prototype. But, we were 2nd runner up among the 7 teams. And really, it is all by luck.

Today, final presentation. This presentation is totally unprepared. We knew it is going to work. BUT, the system went wrong again and again in the beginning. After a few refresh….finally…and our supervisor is happy with it.

Maybe you might ask, why our system always goes wrong? I have no idea, it never works properly in school. Here is the demo video of our FYP. This video is captured by the DV that i showed to you above. Enjoy!

Work on FYP since last night, then today continued working on it for whole afternoon…..Finally there is some sign of approaching final product…

But AAI and Parallel Processing…..R.I.P

Yet another similar idea to our FYP. This time is a research project called GeoLife, which just released a version 2 from Microsoft Research Asia.

GeoLife is a more complete compare to Google Latitude. Basically it track and save the places you had been, geo-tagging photo, search for new friend nearby, etc…

Here is an introductory which I extracted from a China’s web site:

旅行者想要的“地图人生”

如果你在第一次参观北京后，把这天的照片在地图按行程的顺序一一呈现，那该是多么让人兴奋的事情。俗话说，一张图片胜过千言万语，何况一组照片能按地图排列并被轻易检索？同时，对于旅游部门来说，通过对成千上万个旅行者的照片按地图进行比照，他们可以知道并在地图上标明哪里是热门景点，哪里需要增加帮助外国人的双语标识，哪里对于旅行者来说特别容易走错等等。

这样的照片位置追踪并不是你现在就可以在北京做到的，除非你认识郑宇或者他在北京的同事。这个名叫GeoLife（地图人生）的发明正是微软亚洲研究院3月5日在美国总部雷蒙德向世界展示的45件发明之一。

GeoLife是一种以GPS数据为中心并基于电子地图的应用系统。用户可以将GPS或照片内容导入到系统中，自动生成一个按照时间和地点分析的图示，以描述你在过去一段时间内的活动，并可增加社交概念同好友进行分享。

GeoLife的创意来自微软剑桥研究院的可穿在衣服上的便携式摄像头的成果，并包含在微软名叫My Life Bits（数字化生活）的长期科研项目中。但是郑宇的创新在于，使用一个具有定位功能的普通手机或者普遍被使用的全球定位系统来实现地理地图的成果。关于手机的应用，郑宇研究员表示，通过提供一种基于时间和（或）空间的搜索方式，GeoLife可以帮助用户快速找到特定区域和（或）时间段的轨迹。该搜索特性不但有助于用户从他人的数据中高效发掘出自己感兴趣的经历，也有利于个人从自己模糊的记忆中快速激发想要回忆的事件。比如，用户可通过空间搜索功能查看他人在颐和园区域内拍摄的照片和视频，从而为自己日后的行程安排积累丰富的经验。此外，基于时间段的查询方式，用户也可发掘他人在圣诞节期间的有趣经历。

在去年，微软亚洲研究院还开发了用街景照片搜索地图的系统。通过该系统，计算机可以将用户提交的照片与数据库中数以百万计的街景照片进行匹配，从而找出照片的拍摄地点。为了提高查询速度，微软还开发了一个高效的分布式高维数据索引。在这个索引中，每次查询都能在几秒钟内完成。这个系统同时支持PC和移动设备。

总之，通过搜索地图，用户可以反思自己的过去并规划自己的未来。