Work and exam results

Looking across the River Clyde

I've been so busy with work lately that I've not had the chance to update this blog or take many photographs. The picture above is one I took around a year ago, not too far from my home. Despite the shortcomings of my town, I certainly can't complain about the view!

Last Monday I started work at university, where I'll be spending the next 11 weeks studying visual complexity. Rather than describe what that means (which, ultimately, is a goal of the research project), I'll leave it to your imagination: visual complexity concerns how "complex" an image is. Vague, I know, but what this project aims to achieve is to start trying to construct a model for assessing the visual complexity, or "expressiveness" of an image.

We'll be taking several approaches to this, trying to find a relationship between subjective ratings of complexity and some objective measurements which we hope to discover. A lot of previous work in similar areas of research has found that the filesize of a JPEG image typically indicates the complexity due to the nature of the compression algorithm. If there is more redundancy (i.e. the image maybe has a lower "expressivity"), the compressed filesize will be lower. While this seems to make sense in some regards, it'll be interesting to find out if other variables can be used to quantify visual complexity.

I find this exciting work because it's such an open area of research; I find myself reading papers from a wide variety of subjects and already I feel like I've learned a lot even after a week.

Almost all of our exam results have been published now and I'm quite pleased with my grades. My GPA is an A, which I'm pleased with; although in some subjects I feel I could've done better. In particular, I'm very proud of getting an A1 for our team project. As the highest grade possible, it feels like a fantastic reward after a tough year. Our application has had what we consider small-scale success in the Android Market, with over 1000 downloads and a 4.8/5 average user rating. All of that lost sleep and intense effort was worthwhile in the end.