Text Mining is the process by which information is retrieved from written documents.  It turns out that there are many text mining methods that utilize matrices and factorization techniques similar to those that we have learned in CS 322.  There are plenty of previous and current research projects in text mining, and there are […]

As most of you probably know, matrices are a critical part of the representation of sprites and other images on computer screens. This is because most of the interesting things that we want to do with images are simple linear transformations, such as reflections, rotations, projections, and dilations. In essence, the transformation is […]

In our latest project in class, we’re using singular value decomposition to infer a light source from a given light-blocking shape and the resulting shadow it casts on a paper surface. As soon as I read the project description, I was excited about working on this project – it’s almost like being a spy, using […]

The Democratic presidential nomination is still a close battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and the upcoming Pennsylvania primary will be an important one. Obviously there are many factors involved in the outcome of any election, but some are more critical than others. Up to this point, African American population and median […]

The BMW Sauber F1 Team, chose to invest in a custom-built supercomputer, the Albert2, rather than in a second wind tunnel. Powered by 512 Intel Xeon 5160 dual-core processors, Albert2 can make 12.28812 calculations/sec.
Virtual Wind tunnels is a tremendous use of scientific computing in the automotive industry. The BMW team can run models with […]

Digital image restoration is the process of taking a noisy, blurred image and restoring it to its unblurred form. Performing this task typically requires some kind of mathematical model of the blurring process. One way is for image restoration to be thought of as a 2D deconvolution problem, where

f is the original, unblurred image
g is […]

In the blissful days of today, virtually every computer capable of performing floating point arithmetic implements the IEEE 754 standard. In your numerical analysis class, you have likely been told that “This is how floating point works,” upon which you were introduced to the IEEE 754 standard — as if there couldn’t possibly be an […]

Over the last summer, I intern-ed at the technology division of a financial firm. I worked with the fixed income options desk, and my project involved developing software that would analyze and display financial data, such as yield curve cooking, profit and loss attribution, and risk analyses. I remember being incredibly unfamiliar with all these […]

Earlier in the month, a blogger provided an informative overview of the widely used JPEG image compression format (see post, “A brief overview of Jpeg”). It should however be noted that the JPEG format is not good at compressing all types of images, such as images with text. For example, JPEGs tend to […]

As we learned in class and as was mentioned in a previous post on BLAS, there are three levels to the standard. Level 1 was written in the early 70s (though only published in ‘79) and provides vector operations, Level 2 was created in the mid 1980s and cover matrix-vector ops, and Level 3 was […]