Tag: Research

I’m published in CACM! (But not in the way one might have thought)

CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS
CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS

The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.

Tags: alum, Andy Korth, Art, cacm, communications of the acm, computer science, evolutionary computation, Flickr, graphics, MICS, photograph, photos, presenting research, Research, Science, Tyler Hutchison, UMM, umm csci

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A neat use of some of my photos

So different from in the winter
So different from in the winter

When I came back from the holidays I had a very pleasant surprise waiting for me in my office mailbox: A 2010 calendar from Schloss Dagstuhl. Each month has a small day grid at the top, and one or two photos of Dagstuhl below; the photos for each month are actually the front of a postcard that you can separate from the calendar and use.

The cool part is that most of the photos are mine! This set on Flickr shows all the photos they used, although many of them actually look much better in the calendar. Their staff did a really great job of straightening, cropping, and adjusting the lighting on the shots that they used, and it really made the photos look really nice. Thanks to whoever did the excellent work! Christian Lindig informs me (see the comments) that the design work was done by Margot Behr. Thanks for the great work, Margot!

It was really weird when I first looked at the calendar, because I really wasn’t sure how many of the photos were mine. There were two or three that I immediately recognized as mine (like the image at the top), but there were quite a few indoor detail shots that seemed like the kind of thing that I’d take (like the dragon below), but which I didn’t really recognize. There were also several of buildings that could have been mine, but could have been taken by most anyone. Going through, them, though, I was able to determine that all but two were in fact mine. The cropping (and to a lesser degree the cleaning) that the Dagstuhl folks did often threw me as it sharpened the focus in cool ways that I hadn’t seen or thought of.

Iron dragon at Dagstuhl
Iron dragon at Dagstuhl

The Flickr set has the 13 photos they used, in the order that they appear in the calendar. (Three of the cards are composites of two photos, which is why there’s more than 12 photos.)

There are two photos in the calendar that aren’t mine, both taken in specific conditions that I’ve never been there for. One is a really cool panorama with a beautiful fresh coating of snow and the other is the grounds around the chapel in the summer.

Tags: Computing, Dagstuhl, my photography, Photography, publishing, Research

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