Bart Thomee of Yahoo! introduces the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million (YFCC100M), a collection of images and videos released to aid researchers in computer vision and artificial intelligence.
An interview with Shashi Shekhar at the University of Minnesota, as he describes challenges and opportunities from computing relationships in the spaces of our real world.
An interview with Carl Doersch about his paper, which shows how Google Street View images can be deconstructed to extract a city’s characteristic features. Shot at at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Tom is a strong creative and technical writer, and quickly captured the voice we needed for the launch materials. He was open to input and changes, highly responsive, and readily available throughout the entire project, even on nights and weekends and when separated by continents.
Interviews with Carlos Guestrin and Eric Horvitz, who join Dafna Shahaf in a project to map and connect information much as a metro map visualizes a city subway. Shot in Seattle and Redmond, Washington.
Interview with Thomas Dietterich about fears — both real and imagined — as artificial intelligence gains capabilities. Shot in the forests of Eastern Oregon.
I saw the video you set up [of my work], and it is really great! All the people who saw it found it particularly pedagogical in explaining
the reasons why we need such [programming] languages.
An article about apps that attempt to discern when their users exhibit signs of depression, mania, and other mental issues.
Interview with Benoît Valiron about programming quantum computers, in particular about his new language, “Quipper”. Shot at the University of Waterloo (Canada) during a conference on the subject.
An article reviewing whether search engines et al. isolate us from unusual ideas and beliefs through a “filter bubble”.
An interview with ACM Fellow Daniel Reed about the division between exaflop supercomputing and exabyte data management — and how each field can inform the other. With lots of B-roll, thanks to staff and faculty throughout the University of Iowa.
In the Esperanto language there was a great writer and activist known as “Kabe“. After creating magnificent translations and reaching a position of authority, he suddenly left Esperanto life, never to participate again. So notorious was his disappearance, the language gained the verb “Kabei” — to vanish suddenly from a position of great visibility.
I’d be flattering myself to compare my position in the Drupal world to Kabe’s in Esperantio — the Esperanto world. But my lynda.com courses and other writings about Drupal made me fairly well-recognized in Drupal circles.
I’ve been absent from those circles for the last couple of years, and feel the need to give closure to — and recognize — those I got to know there.
I got started in Drupal because I wanted to build a dynamic website to promote a book I’d written. It was a period of great growth for Drupal, and lynda.com accepted my proposal to create a seven-hour “Essentials” video course. (I think they agreed because their first CMS course — on WordPress — was selling pretty well.) That led to seven more, a book, a magazine column, various presentations, and a lot of corporate work.
Was I a “Drupalista”? That’s tough to say. I’ve sincerely enjoyed working with it: Although I’ve come to recommend WordPress for inexperienced site builders with minimal needs, I’m still thrilled with how much I can accomplish with Drupal and a free afternoon. As I (like most people) have come to live more and more online, Drupal has given me more control over my environment. For example, I’m not afraid that I’ll lose a major chunk of my history as LiveJournal slips down the tubes: Through Drupal I made a local copy, privately linking commenters to their real-wold contact information. Those tools, those gifts of the Drupal community, are still with me.
We grew apart. Drupal ceded the mom-and-pop market to other platforms, focusing instead on enterprise needs. That’s a fine match… but it’s not what interests me, personally. Coding — a skill I don’t have — eclipsed site-building, evidenced by the increasing percentage of Planet Drupal posts on the subject. And Drupal 8’s unexpectedly long development time caused a major writing project to stall after I’d put in a month of work.
But oh! What a fine relationship we’ve had. I’m scared to list the people who have made my time in “Drupalio” so much fun — I’m sure I’d miss many. But I want to recognize everybody who helped me on Drupal.org; those involved with Drupal companies I’ve worked with (Commerce Guys, Mediacurrent, Acquia, Phase2 Technology, DrupalEasy, Tag1 Publishing, TopNotchThemes); those who corresponded privately about Drupal matters; and those who continue to make Drupal great. I’d be very happy to hear from you directly, and will continue to check in on drupal.org (where I’m tgeller) from time to time.
I’ve gone back to general technology journalism and communications. Lately I’ve been quite happy working in video, and have started a U.S.-based agency, Tom Geller Productions. Making a monthly video for The Association for Computing Machinery has put me in touch with people doing fundamental research. I intend to do for that community what I’ve tried to do for the Drupal community: to make their work clear and accessible to those without specialist knowledge.
Esperantio and “Drupalio” are quite different. But they’re similar in an important way — one that’s shared by any international community of people gathered for a righteous cause. After a time, the cause changes and falls away, leaving intact relationships that linger. As Wavy Gravy said, “It’s all done with people.” Although I might kabei, look forward to seeing you people, wherever we meet.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/moving-from-drupal-tom-geller
Similar to the video I produced last year to celebrate 2013 recipient Leslie Lamport, this one describes highlights from the career of this venerable name in relational database science.
An interview with two French roboticists, with a demonstration of how a humanoid robot actualizes their research.
A researcher and a military expert at Adapx discuss how they speed up battlefield planning with “multi-modal input” that marries speech, sketch, and writing.
Your tutorials on lynda.com were really helpful, they make it really easy for non-programmers.
I just finished your Drupal 7 Essential Training on lynda.com. It was very informative. I also bought your Drupal 7: Visual QuickStart Guide book from Amazon. I’m about half-way through it. I know there is overlap in the information, but I find that watching the videos and reading the book helps it stick. I have a MODX and WP background, so your training really helped me with absorbing Drupal. Thank you.
Adobe researcher Sylvain Paris explains how a new method of combining Gaussian and Laplacian pyramids results in image filters that can enhance details without distorting edges.
Article about vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, touching on vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) efforts, government involvement, and models that feature V2V technologies.
Videojournalism about a new method for comparing the processes called “finite-state machines” that underlie much of computer science.