Y3 Hub

S.H.E 11th Album, FM S.H.E is out!
of the 12 songs, i like 沿海公路的出口, 安静了 and 612星球 the most.
preview the songs below and buy original if u like it!

Thinking too much…

I had been thinking too much recently, mostly on my future. I’m planning my schedule for next semester. Besides my 2 outstanding modules (Engineers & Society and one year 4 elective), should I take more enriching modules (e.g. business finance, artificial intelligence, computer vision) or should I work part-time or take up an internship? Money is a big factor; I had told my mother that I am not taking any allowance from them any more. So I have to try to survive for the months of January to April 2009.

Job Hunting…

I had started job hunting, maybe now is too early, because I can only start full-time work from Oct 2009 onwards (Because I still have to serve the nation for 5 months after graduation). I am still wondering about my career path. Should I choose a relatively relax job and take a part-time Master of Science at the same time? Or should I should choose a hectic and challenging career in one of the MNCs or government agencies? Do I like research? Should I work in banks because of the money? Which area should I go into? Robotics? Speech recognition? Embedded system programming? Information systems? Computer Graphics? Computer Vision? There are many things I am interested, but it seems to be impossible to find a career that covers all my interests. If you are working in the computing industry, please leave a comment and give me some advice.

By the way, last Tuesday, I went to the Global Banks Networking Session organized by NTU Career & Attachment Office. The participating banks were Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, and Standard Chartered. I am particularly attracted to Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch. First of all, Credit Suisse’s speaker on that day is Vice Chairman of Asia Pacific and also ex-minister of finance of Philippines, there must be something attractive that draws him over. Secondly, CS also had a Technical Associate program that gives technology (or IT) analyst a fast-track 2year route to management positions. For Merrill Lynch, I heard a few positive feedbacks from people who had their IA in ML. And ML doesn’t have a management associate program, which puts me (a student with poor grades) on the same position as those first-class graduates.

Joining back CAC

This academic year (2008/2009), I will be joining back CAC (Cultural Activities Club) as Drumzout Media & IT officer and member of Media & IT supporting committee. Some of my old friends in CAC said I am crazy, but I see this as the last chance that I can experience student life. Besides, I could improve my IT skills and make more friends, so why not?

That’s all for now. I think I had to get back to work.

Many things happened since my last post, but there seems to be more sad things than happy ones. Firstly our 小胖 didn’t pass the qualifying rounds on 27th May, then I received my demoralizing exam results on 18th June. And then I started IA at I²R on 7th July.

TechX Challenge Qualifying Rounds was held on 27th May 2008 at Singapore Expo, where 11 teams were present. However only 9 teams went through the tests, because I heard the other 2 teams have missing parts trapped at the customs. Our dear 小胖 successfully pass 4 out of 6 tests with some hiccups, so we didn’t qualify for the finals. The tests we pass are E-Stop Functional Test, E-Stop Braking Test, E-Stop Manipulator Test and Stairs Climbing Test. 小胖 failed the elevator operation test due to the camera failed at the point where it needs to poke the correct button. And he failed obstacle avoidance test due to algorithm and network problems. Although we did not pass, I still think it’s a great experience and also enjoyed the good lunch provided by DSTA. haha… Although we felt sad about it, we still celebrated with a lunch at Raffles Country Club a few days later.

On 18th June (I think so), I received my exam results. Two extremes appear on my results. On one hand, I got A for my FYP, on the other hand, I failed 2 modules. Which means I need to extend my student life for 1 more semester. Haiz… I can only blame on my laziness on this. I would be retaking these 2 modules in sem 2 (Jan to May 2009) after my attachment. I’m still considering should I go back to serve my 5-month NS liability or work part-time while I take these 2 modules.

7th July, I started Industrial Attachment at I²R. The location is in the campus of NUS. There’s another 2 guys from NTU on attachment with me also, but all of us are working on different projects. One is working on scene recognition and the other on data mining, my project is on Synchronization of lyrics to music audio.

Most of the rooms are designed in a style of a big room divided into smaller rooms. There are also other normal rooms. Most of the rooms have 2 or more people working in it. I was wondering how 2 people can squeeze into a room that was normally intended for 1 person. The room is even smaller than the office of my NTU’s professors (1 prof to 1 room)! Luckily I am allocated to a larger room with 2 other students (I think from NUS), but the furniture in the room looks like those in the 1980’s. The working environment is rather quiet, everyone seems to be working on their own. However the support staff are quite friendly.

Although my project is speech related, but I am allocated to Signal Processing Department (instead of Human Language Technology Department). Most of the time I need to learn things from online materials and papers. Regarding food, Within the 1st week, I already tried the NUS Business, Arts and Yusof Ishak House Canteens, with the other 2 NTU interns. I can only conclude that Business canteen’s chicken rice sucks, the other 2 canteens are still ok. But the price of food there is much cheaper than NTU. The office is moving to Fusionopolis on 26th July, hopefully there will be better canteens and facilities. Currently I am still doing literature review of existing techniques in aligning lyrics with music and looking through some programming API and libraries that I can use, so I’m still quite lost of what to do. Hopefully things would become clearer when I finish reading the 14 journal papers that my supervisors give me. That’s all folks!

Recently I had been busy almost everyday. Straight after my FYP presentation, I started working with a team on the CARV (Cognitive Autonomous Rescue Vehicle) aka 小胖 (the nickname my teammates give) for the TechX Challenge Qualifying Rounds on 27th May 2008. I’m glad that I am paid $10/hour for working on the robot on weekdays, better than working for other temp jobs. haha… Besides that, I also had some gatherings on weekends. And I am going to Batam on 31st May and 1st Jun!

For next semester, starting July, it had been confirmed that I would be going Institute for Infocomm Research for Industrial Attachment(IA). Details as below:

Orgn Name : Institute for Infocomm Research (Heng Mui Keng)

Assigned Project : Synchronization of lyrics to music audio

Scope : With the advancement of digital technologies, digital music is becoming increasingly popular. Large collections of digital music are available, being an online music store or personal MP3 song collections. However, an effective and efficient way of interacting with music collections is still missing that fully makes use of the musical information. The reason is that the existing method of indexing and retrieval of music is solely by keywords or labels, such as artists name, album name and etc. This project will investigate the approach of content-based analysis of music songs, by which the lyrics of a song can be synchronized with the audio. We tag the words (or phonics) of the lyrics automatically with a time stamp, which is in synchronization with the singing vocal of the singer of the music. In this project, existing methods for lyrics synchronization will be studied, and a new approach with better performance would be proposed. The main work areas are speech/singing signal processing, feature extraction and representation, similarity measure and efficient matching algorithms. From the project, a demo system would be developed to illustrate the lyrics-song-synchronization results. This work has potentially high value in research of music information retrieval. It could be very useful for music search applications, such as music query by singing.

Pre-requisites : Proficient in C/C++ programming Knowledge in text information retrieval or speech/audio signal processing

Attachment Location : 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace S(119613)

Seems like a tough IA right? That’s all for now. Tomorrow still have to work on the robot… Qualifying Rounds is on next Tuesday!

The Exams are over!!! (hopefully forever, unless I fail any modules)…

Looking at the 5 papers I took this semester, I really don’t have confident in any of the papers. I really regretted not revising during the semester, and last minute hugging the Buddha’s legs (臨時抱佛腳).

After the last paper (which coincidently falls on my birthday today), I treated some classmates for lunch at the new chinese restaurant in NTU (named Broadway NTU restaurant, which is a very weird name). The food there is not bad but the service sucks. Firstly, the waiters and waitress can’t recognize the dish they are serving. Secondly, their service is very slow. Thirdly, they got a serious communication problem, they can’t even confirm how many char siew paus are in a plate.

Ok, now I’m back at lab to touch up my FYP, and prepare for the last dance of FYP presentation on 7th May. May 大伯公 bless me to pass all modules and for a smooth presentation.

I know it has been a long time i haven’t update my blog… yup, I have been very busy with busy with FYP and also going for gatherings with friends… I think I should not drag you all with the details of FYP, because many wouldn’t be interested to hear actually…

so I talk about gatherings, the significant ones are

• Gathering with 15th Exco (Cultural Activities Club) at Xian De Lai (Bugis Liang Seah Street) on 8th Dec 2007
• Chalet with NTU classmates at Aloha Loyang on 21st to 22nd Dec 2007
• Christmas Dinner with poly friends at sebas’s house on 23rd Dec 2007
• Gathering with Ventura (CAC FOC) on 27th Dec 2007
• Going for watch night service with sebas, xiang and yi jie at Grace Assembly of God on 31st Dec 2007

sorry that i cannot write more… coz i still need to go back to my FYP… here are the photos, enjoy! (ps: you can also find the photos in photos section and download in zip format)

Gathering with 15th Exco (Cultural Activities Club) at Xian De Lai (Bugis Liang Seah Street) on 8th Dec 2007

Chalet with NTU classmates at Aloha Loyang on 21st to 22nd Dec 2007

My friend, vincent just created a website for gratitude sharing…. click on the banner below and start joining the forums!

I just imported my old blog posts from my old website, ymeagain.bravehost.com/blog.html , for those interested in seeing the posts, they are dated from april 2006 to March 2007… I should have done it earlier… I still have some posts at my even older tripod site, i will import after exams…

Ok, I have to go back to study CPE301 Digital Communications!!! The intensive maths module!!!

25th November 2007 16:04: Imported blog posts from ymeagain.bravehost.com/blog.html

25th November 2007: Added links to Marcus’s and Gincent’s blog on the sidebar.