KOSeek

is a new mobile information system for Android for students of the Czech Technical University. This is also an invitation for an official introduction of KOSeek along with Samsung watch presentation. What a coincidence: check on your watch what is going on at your university.

Thanks to CTU support students of the CTU Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Faculty of Information Technology developed a simple mobile application for Android. It allows searching students and employees allowing direct call or email. Students can access the courses information, business hours in the student’s office, get in touch with dean's office. The application also shows the recent RSS feeds for CTU, FEE and FIT. Once you get hungry check the menu at the cafeterias.

The KOSeek beta version was launched one week ago and the Google Play Market already shows 100+ downloads. We have not advertised the application properly yet, and we know we have more downloads. The rating is approaching 4. We also have some crashes but we work on debugging them. We are also happy to report there is already a discussion and many students are sending us comments and suggestion. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no faculties comments. Wait, my boss had commented!

The whole app was developed thanks to CTU. It is based on a long time project at FIT developing KOS API, which was essential for the KOSeek. This API is allowing to access the basic databases in the main information system called KOS. By the way KOS in Czech == blackbird and KOSeek == little blackbird! The FIT students are working with the Computer Information Center of CTU and it is definitely not a smooth ride, but it is hard to beat a person who never gives up. We keep the fingers crossed to get more out of KOS API and enable further functionality. Thanks guys!

The fronted, the Android application was developed at FEE. Three students, MSc, BSc, and a freshman, Adam, Dusan and Tomas joined together to design a great UI. Along the lines they have put together a reasonable development environment using standard tools, git, Android Developers Studio, Play Market. We have now a reasonably organized development and product threads in git, build system with Unit Tests and other tools. This is allowing newcomers to join effectively and get fast productive. I am sure there will be many other students joining. Are you interested, let me know. The build includes also an automatic User Database generation, which is part of the download allowing for KOSeek incremental search support. We use the Android build-in SQLite db.

KOSeek is still in its beta version, there is still lot of work required to make it perfect. We are receiving many suggestions for improvements from users as well as from developers. We have created a wishlist and we try to prioritize based on demand. It will be a hard task to keep the number of features at a reasonable, most useful level. Yes, most of the users are people of technical background, they will handle it, but anyway simpler is better!

Currently, the team is busy debugging, adding the most requested feature and some more goodies. We would like to introduce this features during the official KOSeek kickoff in the eClub meeting on Tuesday Oct. 8th at 5:00 pm in ERA Svet. Come and join us, you will also have a chance to see the latest Samsung watch and Note 3. Samsung representatives will bring the gear with them to let you enjoy a sneak preview. We also be very happy to answer questions and we are expecting further questions and suggestions. In the mean time enjoy KOSeek.

Check, what we prepare in eClub

EClub starts on Tuesday first of October in ERA Svet at 5:00pm. Michal Pechocek will open the series with the Cognitive Security story. Join us to learn how to replicate their success.

We will meet Zdenek Paskevic in the next meeting (Oct 8). This will be a unique opportunity learning all about the new Samsung watch. Zdenek is the mobile devices program manager in Samsung and will introduce the whole line including the latest flagship phablet Galaxy Note 3. Zdenek and his colleagues will be ready to answer all questions and we will try to let you play and test the gear. In addition, with Samsung we plan to run a small presentation at two stands in Karlovo nam and in Dejvice. For two weeks starting October 10, all the latest devices will be displayed. But that is not all eClub, CVUT and Samsung are together with some more partners busily working on a New Academic Year Surprise for all students. Wait, I will soon report!

Let me quickly mention the next meeting topic. Microsoft will visit eClub after Samsung (Oct 15). Stepan Bechynsky will deliver an Internet of Things presentation. He will discuss the new opportunities of this technology and will share with us the Microsoft perspective. This is a great opportunity for a discussion not only about the new contextual oriented applications but also about the future mobile and wearable devices and applications in general.

We have many other presentations in preparation. Check our web page for the program. The first three presentations are confirmed but we may still need to do some changes. Check carefully the location and time, because of space limitations in ERA Svet we will run some of the presentations from CVUT at Karlovo nam. Stay tuned we will inform you as soon as we complete the next presentations.

eClub high tech competition

eClub is back, we are starting the next round. I would like to explain why we shoot for high tech projects. How is the competition organized this semester. I also would like to attract all students with great innovative ideas to join us. We will help you!

The Winter 2013 eClub will extend the tradition of our weekly meetings, but with some enhancements. Let me explain. The startup scene is getting bigger and bigger world wide as well as in Prague. Every global company has a sort of startup program attracting startups. We can see many new incubators. In Prague some have already a good track record - StartupYard and Node5. All this made me to think about our direction as a university club for students of technical universities.

I get in touch with many young people who are starting their professional career, making the first decisions. Basically there are three choices: working for a company, creating a startup or becoming a scientist and pursue the PhD. Most of the graduates will start their professional life as engineers in a company at various positions including sales. eClub tries to help students with their own ideas and enthusiasm, who are committed to change them to products. They have essentially two different ways how to materialize the ideas and get them to customers: through a startup or a technology transfer. In either case eClub will help. We will present know-how for creating startups as well as helping with innovation and technology transfer. This way eClub wants give you the opportunity to test your skills and choose the best future path.

This semester competition for CVUT and other universities students will therefore reflect these changes, see below. We plan as usual a competition for the best startup project. But the competition will also addresses students interested in high-tech, innovation, science and research too. We will welcome proposals for not only startup plans, but in addition, we will also support development and research projects. The only condition the proposed projects must lead to a clear industrial solutions. The entrants have to prove they are solving real problems and with a demonstrable impact. We will try to give away awards in both categories.

Who can enter? We will welcome students working on their baccalaurean, diploma as well as dissertation works. Yes, it will be difficult to decide what project to support. The variety will be very large. To ensure equal opportunities an fair decisions we will as usual put together a panel of international judges to decide. Therefore, traditionally all presentation are expected to be delivered in English. The criteria for startup projects will be the same as in the previous semesters. In the technology transfer we will focus on how innovative is the proposed project and what is the financial impact. The scientific quality of the proposed ideas is not the only part of evaluation. The problem formulation and how it solves industrial problems will have significant weight in the final project selection. Currently I am working on detailed competition rules. They will appear at the eClub pages soon.

And how about presentations? We will again deliver interesting and entertaining presentations. As usual we want to open in a grand style. We are lucky Prof. Pechoucek, the director of the local Cisco research office promised unwrap the whole block and deliver the full Cognitive Security story. CoSe is an enormous success not only for the CVUT but for the whole Czech startup scene. It is one of the first startups acquired by a large company as Cisco. What more, it is a research based, high-tech lab employing the top Czech brains. We need many more of these. Currently, we are also preparing the Geewa and Nejremeslnici presentations showing how to start and grow international and local business. This semester we will try to balance how to do business and the technical trends presentations. We noticed that the technological presentations were very popular last semester and this is another reason for this move. One of the first very attractive trends we would like to cover is Internet of Things inspiring a great number of new ideas and startup.

This is a first of the eClub blogs. Follow me, I will tell you more. Let me know if you have better idea or comments. I would like to set all to encourage the largest number of students to actively joining us.

Summer projects

Summer is great, I can finally focus on real research and development. We have pursued several interesting projects in machine learning and we designed one Android application in the Cloud Computing Center. 

Tomas has been mostly focusing on documents categorization. His task is: for a given document find the best category. In practice this kind of algorithm allows automatic tagging of documents, it is good for grouping similar documents or it can be used for pairing ads and content in web advertising etc. To categorize the documents we need to build models for all categories. We have generated large number of models with the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm. The final classification to the best category was done with a Random forest (RF) classifier trained on a set of manually categorized documents. The training set was kindly provided by Seznam.cz. The LDA is requiring a lot of computational power. To accommodate these requirements we selected the Cloudera virtual images with preinstalled Hadoop. The LDA is written in Python and was run in Mapreduce. The work is in progress and the results are promising.

Ondrej with other students is looking in to another interesting problem. They try to model on-line gamers. We have received data from Pool Live Tour game made by Geewa. The data shows in detail the user behaviour. The task is simple. Model users good enough to predict their readiness for buying a new cue. Players are gaining skills, proceeding to higher levels, spending more time in the game etc. All this has to be captured to estimate the correct moment for cue update. The biggest problem in such projects is to get through the data and extract the right features. Mirek from Geewa helped us with decoding how it works. The data includes gamers who bought as well as non-buying users. This is good for supervised training. Again we decided to use our popular RF algorithm for classification. Currently we are planning tests. The models we have developed are also useful for clustering users to groups, for uncovering cheating etc. Similar models can be used for many other games or activities. These algorithms may uncover necessary insight and help us making the game or activity more challenging and engaging. This field is really rich for many further improvements. The greatest advantage: there are really many gamers producing a lot of data and more data results in bigger power.

In June we have started to work on Android application for the CTU students. The app allows them to search for faculties and students from the mobile device. Students can find their classes with detailed description. The app also offers detailed information about the university. The built-in RSS feed reader aggregates the most important university information sources. Finally the application allows users to check what is todays menu in the canteens. We are almost finished. We are starting testing and final debugging. Our plan is to give this away to students next month. It will be downloadable through Google Play for Android owners. We plan to introduce the iPhone version later, since iPhone is less frequent between students. Thanks go to the group of programmers at the FIT faculty of CTU who prepared the required KOS API.

There are some more projects we are cooking in our lab, but I will report about them next time. If you are interested in our projects or if you want to join our group let me know. We have plenty of interesting tasks.

We have finished several interesting machine learning projects recently. I have updated  our Cloud Computing Center where you can find more details, other finished projects as well as description of what we work on now.  

First, let me describe new implementation of a Contact-less heart beat measurement on iPad. Jan Plešek has designed an iPad app, which works similarly to Mirror, mirror, tell me who's the most beautiful? You just watch the iPad screen locating your face in a square and in a couple of moment the system tells you a pulse rate estimate. The application is using a unique algorithm for the pulse frequency estimation based on the observed changes of the under the eyes skin color . The human heart pumps the blood and the built in iPad camera can recognize the difference in color during the high an low pressure. To focus to the right place the app must first find face, nose, eyes and then focuses under the eyes. The color changes constitute a time series to which we apply a simple algorithm estimating its base frequency. We have achieved a similar accuracy as the standard heart beat equipment.

The next project was done in cooperation with AVG. Yes, the famous anti-virus company. I bet that on many of your machines, while reading this, is softly humming their Free Antivirus software. Ondrej Pluskal has specialised on the development of Mallware detection, particularly on the algorithm estimating anomalies. The antivirus is continuously watching what is going on on your PC: what files are downloaded, what apps are started, what dll’s are instantiated etc. All this and similar actions are signals forming feature vectors. The task is then simple - identify those signalling an anomaly. To design an algorithm deciding which vectors or situations are perfectly legal from malicious situations requires learning. Taching classifier requires a lot of vectors describing usual situations and also the malicious vectors to discover the difference between them. We have received such a data collected on running PCs from AVG. Our classifier is using the Support Vector Machine (SVM). After lot of work with preprocessing, testing and tuning of the operation point, we have delivered a new classification vector improving the performance. We are hoping our solution will get soon to the product.

Third, Tonda Novák was involved with the Design of Probabilistic Models for Text Input Correction project. It was a great opportunity to explore the learning to rank algorithms capabilities, which became the core of the solution. What is it doing? When entering a query to a search engine users are making mistakes and the engine needs to correct them before starting the search. To find what the user really wants to enter is not a simple task. They are entering many more different words than we can find in a standard dictionary, many words are appearing or are being created on everyday basis, some of the works are showing in multiple words phrases, some users do not know the spelling but know the phonetic version. We have collected all this information to guess what the user wants to type. Of course, there are multiple choices for each word. The problem is to put all the information together and run an algorithm deciding what is the most likely word or phrase the users is about to enter. Tonda has decided to use the pair-wise learning to rank algorithm. It outputs a list of ranked corrected queries. It is a supervised algorithm requiring a learning set. We have used a corpus of queries from the seznam.cz search engine. Jointly with seznam.cz we set up a testing server to run tests on unknown test set to measure the accuracy. Our machine works quite well. The proof: parts of our algorithm are already in the product version of seznam.cz query correction. Hooray!

I have chosen these three examples of our projects to show how we want to progress in the future. It is simple, we want to focus on machine learning algorithms in practical applications. Most of students want to work on real industry problems. They would like to get practical experience before leaving the school, cooperate with a company to try how it feels working for them. This is also the best form of a cooperation for the faculty, because we can apply the latest research results and confront them with the industry. \It is not easy to find the right projects and put all the required ingredients together. It requires people with vision and empathy on both sides in the industry and academia too. Not all companies are ready, not all companies compete delivering better, and technologically more advanced solutions. At the university it is a never ending process searching for the best partners, with leaders interested in innovation, bringing their customers the best solutions. We are looking for more partners with clear technological vision to help them solving the most challenging problems in AI, machine learning and computer science. If you know suitable company let me know.

How Googlers defend the MSc theses

Vojta Jina successfully defended his MSc theses at the Czech Technical University. He has designed and wrote Karma a JavaScript Test Runner. I was his supervisor and I feel very relieved, I have managed pushing him through the process of finishing exams, writing a theses and defending it.

I met Vojta about two years ago and that time he already was a real geek. He knew what he wants to do. His life was coding and the chosen language - JavaScript. He just arrived from a stay in Google London where he was practicing as a student. I was very happy to meet with a student having clear idea for a diploma work. It was great to see him step by step formulating what he needs for developing the JS code. He was enough self motivated and I did not need to do anything except to keep an eye on him finishing exams on time - geeks have very radical opinions, which are not a great match with very theoretically focused examiners. What more, the university curriculum was not of a top interest for Vojta, but beside few flops he got through. Shortly after we agreed on the diploma task he got hired by the AngularJS in Mountain View. I know some of the AngularJS folks and it is a great team. They live for their projects, they love programming, they were free to make their own development decisions and this is the spirit most of the programmers are looking for. Vojta immediately became one of them, dedicated to the project. It became even more difficult to stay in touch. We had regular Skype chats 8:00 am Europe and 11:00 pm California time. I enjoyed the chats discovering what is going on in Silicon Valley. Vojta was making big progress in improving the code, giving presentations and other activities. I was very happy Vojta is moving ahead, but the deadline for submitting the diploma work was approaching quickly and the fear of the blank page grew. He already had well working code on github, number of downloads was rapidly increasing, but the university needs the diploma work. It was a struggle, every week we had to go through the wording discovering how to write and what is the structure of a technical report. It was also big effort to get rid of many geeky wording.

The submission day approached and Vojta’s sister was haunting me to get the last signatures before officially submitting the work. Finally, few days before the state exam and diploma defense Vojta arrived with a Californian smile on his face. We met in my house. He brought the latest Google Chrombook. We had great time and some glasses of scotch, but I had no idea what is awaiting me.

The state committee is a panel of very serious, very formal professors, total missmatch with Vojta's attitude. Vojta entered the room very relaxed, no tie and he immediately started: "hi guys, how are you doing these days? Ok, life is short and time is swift, I’ll skip the details and show you some nifty tricks". He continued: "if you did not know, this is a terminal screen. Just give me a second, I need to launch bunch of daemons to make the things move". Then he started typing in a speed of about 200 chars/min first commands. Each enter key hit emitted the full screen of text. In a sunny room with an obsolete projector nobody had a chance to read a single line. Vojta did not show any sign of nervousness and in a cheerful tone was praising his great ideas commenting like: “isn’t it great, this is even better, I have almost forgotten, I need to show you this trick”. He certainly was successful in making the professors awake, they have never encountered candidate like him. Vojta finished the presentation very abruptly saying: “Ok, this is may be enough, if you have any other questions let me know”. The room became dead silent, no questions. I was scared, what would be the perception? It was go/no go situation, either they will get angry and will kick him out or they accept the style and Vojta will become a hero. Luckily the supervisor can comment while the committee is deliberating. To cut the story short. Yes, he is a hero. He has done it. Great job!

The lesson I have learn: I am looking forward supervising other batch of new geeks next year. Let me know.

eClub winners, great new projects

yesterday evening we have awarded eClub summer 2013 winners. The winners are Apeman boards, BlindShell and Mixturam. eClub and MediaLab Foundation awarded scholarships to support further work on their ideas.

The ApeMan team introduced plans for manufacturing cool long boards, which became recently again very popular. They started by creating a community of stylish enthusiasts as well as racers with distinguished taste interested in long boarding. This way they have learned what is the dreamed board, how to design it and how to manufacture it. They are bringing even a little more - great design, which is a very important part of their image, check their cool site. The team includes designers, long board racers, faculty of mechanical engineering PhD. students, and business people. The company manufactures a high-tech carbon based boards with a unique design and great shapes ranging from the middle to the high end.  I wish the team to get through the initial organizational problems as soon as possible and I hope, we will see many more enthusiasts and racers smoothly sliding their boards. I have no doubts, the main award is in the right hands, Apeman will effectively use the 40k scholarship to invest further to technology.

The second team called Blindshell are two students from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. With their tutor they are for quite some time researching user interfaces for disabled people. Blindshell is a launcher for touch based Android phones customized for visually impaired users. The latest smart phones are bringing many new sensors providing lot of information to enable new and smarter applications, but the whole interface is mostly visually intensive. For people with poor vision is sometimes very difficult to effectively take advantage of all the goodies. The whole idea is based on gesture, voice based interface allowing quick access even for visually impaired. The team still needs to turn the idea into a product and I wish we would soon see Blindshell on new Androids.

The third team is MixTuram offering custom tailored food supplement. Check the web, you can mixFDA to offer the products on the US market. I was lucky and I got the first box with the serial number #00001. I am looking forward to show it to my friends once Mixturam is a major worldwide company.
the right set of vitamins and other ingredients to make you stronger. MixTuram will mail you nice small box with 100 pills. Get one and boost your self for better performance. They have already received all the legal approvals in the Czech Rep. and they work with

It was a great evening and we stayed long having great discussion with all winners after announcing the results. All people were energetic and charged to continue working on their ideas. For the first time two of the winners have already running company and one company is already selling. Overall I feel happy - something good is starting and eClub and MediaLab is part of it. We all are looking for the next eClub season, watch us on the web and FB, we will start in September.