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Life in the Ivory Tower



I obtained my Bachelor of Engineering degree at the University of Calgary where I studied a mix of electrical engineering and computer science. In my fourth year, my project group and I made an autonomous robot that navigated mazes. It used a Wii-mote for localization and IR sensors to stop itself from crashing into walls. This was my first foray into the field of artificial intelligence. It was also in my fourth year that I became progressively more addicted to functional programming languages (e.g. Lisp and Scheme), and the compilers to support them. I have been pursuing these two interests, artificial intelligence and compilation, since then.

I obtained my Master's of Applied Science degree at the University of Toronto, where I worked on machine learning and computer vision under the supervision of Prof. Brendan Frey. My thesis project was on using video to help improve static image classification performance, a framework that we called "Flobject Analysis". The approach was quite successful and seemed quite promising. We beat other state-of-the-classifiers such as HOG, and intersection kernels, by more than 20% increase in accuracy. You can read about it here.

Now I am at the University of California, Berkeley, where I am working on programming languages and compilers for game programming on mobile platforms with Prof. Kurt Keutzer.

Master's Thesis
"Flobject'' Analysis: Learning about Static Images from Motion
Patrick S. Li. ''Flobject'' Analysis: Learning about Static Images from Motion. 2011. Master's Thesis, Graduate Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Toronto.

Papers
Learning Better Image Representations Using "Flobject Analysis"
PS Li, IE Givoni, BJ Frey, Learning better image representations using flobject analysis. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2011.

Factorizing Appearance Using Epitomic Flobject Analysis
PS Li, BJ Frey, Factorizing appearance using epitomic flobject analysis. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2012.