Here are some of my favorite new releases from 2008 and 2009. Although I posted in 2006 and 2007, I skipped last year. As a result, 2008 will also be featured in this post.

2009

• IQ — “Frequency”
• Porcupine Tree — “The Incident”
• Transatlantic — “The Whirlwind”
• Dream Theater — “Black Clouds and Silver Linings”
• Blackfield — “Blackfield NYC” (CD release)
• OSI — “Blood”
• Riverside — “Anno Domini High Definition”
• Glass Hammer — “Three Cheers for the Broken-Hearted”
• Knight Area — “Realm of Shadows”

2008

• Frost* — “Experiments in Mass Appeal”
• Ayreon — “01011001″
• Steven Wilson — “Insurgentes”
• The Pineapple Thief — “Tightly Unwound”
• Demians — “Building an Empire”
• The Tangent — “Not as Good as the Book”

Enjoy!

The Harris Institute for Assured Information at the Florida Institute of Technology formally opened this past Friday, October 23. Here are a few articles:

Florida Today: Research center opening

Florida Today: Our views: New research center aids cyber wars fight

Wired has an interesting article on the Netflix prize. After three years, a team (two, actually) has finally surpassed the performance benchmarks of the challenge.

This is a bit late, but on April 17, 2009 I had the opportunity to give a second graduate seminar for the Department of Computer Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology. You can watch my talk, “Image Retrieval Using Visual Attention”, online:

http://media.fit.edu/load.php?clipid=3276

My previous talk at FIT is also online.

Harris press release
McAfee press release
Orlando Sentinel article

NPR plays interesting short clips of music between segments known as “buttons”. I heard one during All Thing Considered on Friday that really surprised me. You can find a list of all past buttons, organized by program and date on NPR’s site (including other shows such as Morning Edition and Wait Wait).

The site has the same audio sample from the radio ready to play on demand and links to purchase the music (purchases made through the site support NPR).

From the brief clip I heard on Friday I though they were playing the song “Harmony Korine” from Steven Wilson’s upcoming album, Insurgentes. A visit to the site confirmed it! Not only is it a great song, but the album hasn’t even been released yet (a digital version is available if you preorder, but the physical CD doesn’t come out until late February). Insurgentes is the first solo album from Steven Wilson. His other projects include Porcupine Tree and Blackfield.

On Friday, October 17 I presented an invited talk at the Florida Institute of Technology as part of their seminar series. I spoke about “Image Retrieval Using Visual Attention”. You can watch the talk online (WMV format). There’s also a direct link to my lecture.

Watch out for the surprise ending…

My Ph.D. dissertation abstract was recently included in the ACM SIGMM eNewsletter. The “FAU Salient” image database is also in the issue.

A few weeks ago I added “ClustrMaps” (I don’t think a singular form exists) to Mayron.net. You can see it in the sidebar. It was inspired to add it after seeing one on Oge Marques‘ blog.

While this type of information is available to anyone who has access to the IP addresses of those that visit a site, I thought it was interesting enough to share these locations. The service appears to do a decent job at filtering out the IP addresses of known spiders and other automated agents, leaving behind mostly legitimate hits.

Many of my former colleagues from MLAB at FAU have been traveling abroad this summer, to places such as China (Beijing), Malaysia, Austria, Brazil (Curitiba), and Colombia. Hits from all of these locations show up. The largest concentration of hits is in the vicinity of Phoenix, AZ, although I’m not quite sure why (perhaps there’s an ISP based there that isn’t being filtered yet?).

It’s interesting to contrast the new ClustrMaps with the Guestmap I’ve had on my site for over six years (a link to the Guestmap is just below ClustrMaps in the sidebar). I only recently moved the Guestmap to the front page — it was previously buried on the About page. Unfortunately, the Guestmap only retains the most recent 100 entries, so many have been deleted. The Guestmap asks users to manually select their location and add an entry — only a fraction of visitors will do this. An example of a more modern implementation is Frappr.