This would make a nice tutorial for others trying to teach LaTeX as well as enterprising students trying to find a quick way to jump in and start using it. The workshop I taught was part of a class put on by the Georgia Tech Library. I will teach a second class on Dec. 1, 2008. Much of the work in creating these examples was done by David Reid and adopted (slightly) by me.

I began the class with this presentation:

LaTeX Introduction Presentation

This covers what LaTeX is, why it’s useful, and walks the class through the setup of the integrated TeX editor use used, TeXnicCenter. This talk also introduces the examples covered during the workshop. Below is a link to the example files used.

LaTeX Workshop Files

I walked the class through each of the files, explaining peculiarities and pointing out the differences between commands, environments, etc. The workshop finished with a quick summary of some of the other uses of LaTeX including making slides and posters. I also provided links to these very useful resources:

David’s Slideshow

The Not So Short Guide to LaTeX2e

I may try to tape-record the next class and post the video here for anyone interested in watching.

There are several methods available (tie clips, tie tacks, tie chains, etc.). I’ve used all of these and I don’t care for them. The solution I found is referred to as a “tie strap.” These little strips of cloth (or plastic) attach to the buttons on your shirt and hook through the loop on the back of a tie as shown below.

I like this option for two reasons. One, it’s invisible… people just think your tie is very well behaved. And two, it works really well… no movement, no fabric pulling, no holes in your tie.

You can buy these on Amazon.com or at “The Tie Thing” website. HOWEVER, you can also make one that works great. I didn’t have time for mail order, so I cut up an old white shirt that didn’t fit well. I snipped off the strip with the button holes, and made 3 tie-straps from it. Worked like a charm!

I’ll probably be giving these little gems out like Santa come Christmas time, so if you know me… get ready!

This is a 128 question test where people mark whether or not adjectives describe them. Thus a person might check yes to “Good Leader” and no to “Hard to Impress.” Once all the appropriate answers are marked, each one is weighed and put into an appropriate bin. The size of each bin marks the prominence of that personality trait in the person.

I’ve used this program as my first e-commerce venture. Visit http://www.shawnlankton.com/icl to get information about the program, download the fully-featured demo, or purchase the full program!

Like a good scientist, I’m going to do an experiment. I encourage anyone who knows me (or would like to) to participate. I’ll be ‘tweeting’ over the next few weeks, trying to find followers, and trying to find other people to follow. If you don’t have a twitter account, get one, let me know, and we’ll do the experiment together. If you have an account and want me to follow you then contact me or post a comment and let me know. If you want to follow me, my username is shawnlankton.

Oh the things we do to stay relevant in these turbulent technological times.

This post will cover some tips, tricks, and scripts to get your journal submission ready to go quickly and easily. The big challenges are:

• Getting all figures into single eps files
• Creating a list of figure captions

The good news is that both of these are delightfully quick if you’ve been using LaTeX to compose your article. Read on to find out how

Get all figures into .eps files

For some figures, it may be simple to use convert or any other image editing software to convert simple figures into eps files. With convert, simply type this at a linux or mac terminal:

$ convert image_from_paper.png fig1.eps

If you’ve used the subfigure package, PSTricks, tables, or other funny-business for creating or formatting figures within LaTeX, this process isn’t as straightforward. But by following these simple steps you can get it done quickly.

Create a file: figs_only.tex

figs_only.tex is a file that just contains the code to make and format the figures. Begin by formatting the paper into the two-column format as best you can. Then, copy TeX codes that make the figures into this file:

figs_only.tex

Follow the pattern of the figures in the file and don’t copy over any caption information, just the TeX code to format and place the figures. Also, remember to un-comment the appropriate parts of in the header if you are using PSTricks or subfigure packages.

Note the use of the \clearpage command after each figure environment. This makes a new page for each figure. Also, note the \pagestyle{empty} command at the top. This removes any page numbers so that the figure is the only thing on each page. Finally, when you use subfigure, you’ll have to reset the counter manually by using \setcounter{subfigure}{0} before each figure that uses subfigures.

Get to figs_only.pdf

Great! Now, run LaTeX to create figs_only.dvi. You can follow this up with a call to dvipdf to create figs_only.pdf.

$ latex figs_only
$ dvipdf figs_only

I’ve heard other suggestions to use dvips and then ps2pdf instead of dvipdf, but dvipdf has always worked fine for me. Also, if you aren’t using PSTricks, you can use pdflatex and skip the whole thing! (PSTricks doesn’t play nice with pdflatex, though).

Convert the pdf file to eps figures

This is the really great part. Now that you have a pdf file with each of your figures on a separate page, you can run pdf2eps (from this post). “pdf2eps ” builds an eps file from the page specified. It uses pdfcrop (from here) to trim all whitespace. Hence, all you need to do is run

$ ./pdf2eps.sh 1 fig1.eps
$ ./pdf2eps.sh 2 fig2.eps
… etc.

Voila! now you have eps files for each figure in your article. Remember to go back every figure in the original paper to use the eps file rather than whatever complex LaTeX codes you used to format the figure before.

pdf2eps.sh
pdfcrop.pl

Create the List of Figures

This part is lots simpler than the first! If you’ve used \caption{} within your figure environments, there is a command that will automatically build your list of figures and captions for you. For best results, put this at the end of the .tex file right before \end{document}. This ensures that page numbers are correct.

\clearpage
\setcounter{page}{1}
\listoffigures

Now, when you re-build your article there will be a list of figures nicely formatted and ready to go. You can either print these pages separately or use Adobe to split of the last pages of the document as a separate pdf file. (Does anyone know how to do this without the need to split the document?)

Submit that puppy!

These tips help you prepare the electronic submission to the IEEE journals. Remember to follow all the little rules that may be specific to each publication. Also, please leave some comments if you have any other tips to get these submissions put together.

Finally, special thanks to tug.org for this post which I drew from extensively.

I just have a couple pictures to share. I’ll tell you what, the rooms at the Ritz sure beat the hell out of the rooms I stay in when I travel to conferences! Gigantic beds, big bathtubs, marble counter tops, full closets, and what a view.

When we weren’t eating, drinking, hiking, and socializing I worked with a small group of five people to study, analyze, and solve a practice consulting scenario. David, Judy, Sauraub, Yi and Elizabeth were all bright, funny, and capable. If consulting means working with only top-notch people… I’m in. Here’s the group on a mountain during a hiking trip (minus Yi who decided to go white water rafting instead).

Hopefully this trip was a preview of what being a consultant is like because if it is… I like it!

I show one version of this spread, but it’s very versatile and can seasoned any way you like. Read on for the full recipe!

Ingredients

• 8oz extra-firm tofu
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 handful of fresh cilantro leaves
• 2 Tbsp. spicy mustard
• 2 tsp. lemon juice
• 2 tsp. white vinegar
• pinch of salt
• pinch of red pepper
• pinch of black pepper

Directions
This recipe uses a food processor (maybe a blender would work). Combine the ingredients in this order: First, add the tofu, oil, and mustard. Pulse these together until you achieve a smooth consistency. Then add the cilantro and process until the leaves are broken up.

Next, add the liquids and sprinkle the spices onto the top of the liquids. This will help the spices mix evenly into the spread. Finish by processing until the whole thing is very smooth and well-blended. Finsihed! This makes about 1.5 cups.

As I said, this recipe can be re-made in an uncountable number of ways. Experiment with different spices and spice-combinations. I’ve made sesame-ginger spread, southwest spread, tomato-basil spread… you name it! It’s really hard to mess up!

Bonus! Tasty Sandwich

To make the wrap shown above, I lightly fried a whole-wheat tortilla in a small skillet with some Pam. Next, I spread on a good bit of our new creation and added warm chick peas, and cool, sliced roma tomatoes. Finally, I garnished it with a bit of left-over cilantro… yum.

The gear involved in ice climbing is fantastic. Serious mountaineering boots with a dozen three inch spikes attached to each foot make for a menacing pair of shoes. The crampons give terrific grip while trekking over the ice, and allow you to walk right up verticle faces when needed!

Then you have the “hammers:” long sharp picks that hack into the ice giving you a hand-hold wherever you need it. Combine this with a length of good rope and all the climbing harnesses common to rock-climbing and you’ve got an ice-cold vertical adventure.

We trekked about a half mile onto the glacier before we started making our way up sheer ice walls. Our guide would free-climb the faces and set up safety rigging before we made our way up. The first climb was a real challenge, but once I got an understanding of the technique, and the rhythm: pick, hook, toe-toe-toe. pick, hook, toe-toe-toe… climbing up verticle ice and slight overhangs became a smooth, and exhilarating process.

All said and done… I want more. However, the way things are going there won’t be any glaciers in Atlanta any time soon!

Fun Fact: If you converted all the ice in the Matanuska glacier into margaritas, it would be enough for everyone on the planet to drink a 32oz. margarita every day for the next 20 years!

Edge Finding

Using Contours to Detect and Localize Junctions in Natural
Images. Michael Maire, Pablo Arbeláez, Charless Fowlkes and Jitendra Malik. CVPR, 2008. [paper]

Maire et al. Make significant progress in edge detection and junction detection by using very clever insights into the way humans perceive and draw images. They also demonstrate using convincing metrics that their methods are the state of the art and rapidly approaching human-level of accuracy.

Stereo and 3D

I was impressed with the amount of focus on 3D reconstruction from either stereo cameras or monocular video cameras. This is something that I have been interested in for some time. Due to the apparent focus on this I may pursue this further in the coming months and try to add myself to this list!

Recovering Consistent Video Depth Maps via Bundle Optimization. Guofeng Zhang, Jiaya Jia, Tien-Tsin Wong and Hujun Bao. CVPR, 2008. [project website]

This was one of the first talks I saw and I was floored by the results. The authors use a single video stream to compute beautiful 3D models of the scene. The algorithm makes use of the temporal consistency of video as well as visual similarities between subsequent frames.

Stereoscopic Inpainting: Joint Color and Depth Completion from Stereo Images. Liang Wang, Hailin Jin, Ruigang Yang and Minglun Gong. CVPR, 2008.

Here, authors combine the ideas of in-painting (filling missing areas in an image automatically) and stereo depth estimation to dramatically improve both disciplines. By using in-painting methods, occlusions in stereo pairs can be accurately completed, and by supplementing visual in-painting with depth estimates, better results can be obtained.

3D Point Clouds

The analysis of shapes and 3D objects often relies on the use of a cloud of points on the surface of an object. Although this wasn’t as popular as stereo at CVPR, it was still a noteworthy discipline… and one that is likely to grow.

Three-Dimensional Point Cloud Recognition via Distributions of Geometric Distances. Mona Mahmoudi and Guillermo Sapiro. CVPR, 2008. [google cache of paper]

Shape recognition is a very complicated problem. Here, Mahmoudi and Sapiro take a very refreshing new approach. By computing histograms of features such as pair-wise distances, and curvature they create a system capable of matching shapes very well to ones in large databases. Their method simplifies this hard task and yields excellent results.

Particle Filtering for Registration of 2D and 3D Point Sets with Stochastic Dynamics. Romeil Sandhu, Samuel Dambreville and Allen Tannenbaum. CVPR, 2008.

Cry nepotism if you like, but this is excellent paper from my colleague Rome Sandhu. Lining up point clouds is a task that crops up all over. This technique allows registration of small bits of data onto known models and even bits of data onto other bits of data. The results are simply incredible considering it would be a challenge to do this even for a human!

Visual Summary

Summarizing Visual Data Using Bidirectional Similarity. Denis Simakov, Yaron Caspi. Eli Shechtman and Michal Irani. CVPR, 2008. [project website]

I was amazed last year by a technique called Seam Carving used to re-size images without losing or shrinking important information. This technique accomplishes the same goal, and sometimes does a far better job. The approach is two-fold: 1) make sure the smaller image has as much data as possible from the original, 2) make sure the smaller image doesn’t have any *new* data. The second constraint ensures that no artifacts develop.

Skeletonization

Geometric Modeling of Tubular Structure. Huseyin Tek and M. Akif Gulsun. MMBIA(CVPR), 2008.

I am currently working on vessel analysis myself, and have been reviewing different methods of construction a “skeleton” or stick-like model of a vessel structure. Tek and Gulsun of Siemens Corporate Research have a very clever solution wherein they find the best line through a structure by measuring the “roundness” of the surrounding data.

My Work

Localized Statistics for DW-MRI Fiber Bundle Segmentation. Shawn Lankton, John Melonakos, James Malcolm, Samuel Dambreville and Allen Tannenbaum. MMBIA(CVPR), 2008. [pdf paper]

Just in case you were wondering, this is the paper that brought me to Alaska to take part in this conference. I use a method that looks locally at image differences in brain scans to find the shape of neuron bundles that run through the brain.