Category: Travel

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Austria

“War Museum,” or, “turns out they had hoverboards in 1945”

This first week back is a little crazy – starting up new classes at the University of Vienna is a big hunk of time, but we’ve also got midterms.1 We still have a bit of time for fun, though – on Wednesday, we went and saw a concert at the Musikverein, a beautiful building where I didn’t take any pictures because High Society has some powerful judgement they’ll throw your way if you do that.
But that’s not the subject of this post;2 I’m here to talk about the War Museum that we went to as a class trip on Tuesday.

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Austria United Kingdom

“Edinburgh,” or, “I've found my One True Love and it is this city”

Well, folks, I’m back in Austria.1 The United Kingdom was a lot of fun, though, and I managed to squeeze in a trip up to Scotland at the end.2 And let me tell you, folks, I am very glad I did – only got a day and two nights up there, but it was definitely enough time for me to absolutely fall in love with the city.
It’s a couple different things, really – thanks to Rebecca and her family, I’ve had a deep love of the Scottish accent for quite a while.3 And secondly, Edinburgh specific, is the fact that it’s an old city in a very different way than any of the other European cities I’ve seen this semester. Vienna has a very distinct architectural style, and as long as you stay in the first district you’ll only see, like, four buildings that don’t match that. Prague’s specific style is enforced by the World Heritage Organization. And I don’t really approve of that – it makes for a nice tourism industry, yeah, but living there, you can get bored of it all pretty quickly.
Edinburgh didn’t have that problem – yes, it’s easy to tell that it’s old and a lot of the stuff has been there for a while, but there’s a sense of freedom to the architecture, and the way it varies, that I just didn’t get from anywhere else. I loved it.4
But hey, time to share the love, and that means pictures.

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Austria United Kingdom

“Trent,” or, “no, you can’t buy a $200 fish-eye lens for a single photo”

This is a quick one, because I find it hard to take photos while shivering1 and I didn’t grab a jacket today. Or on this trip. I only had a carry-on, it’s a bit difficult to pack ten day’s worth of clothes into a carry-on sized bag.
Anyhow, went for a quick jaunt around one of the other parks on the Nottingham campus. Pretty dang photogenic, and less windy than yesterday.2

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Austria United Kingdom

“Nottingham,” or, “Wayne Manor is a five-minute walk from your dorm”

I’m in England this week! Because how many other times in life am I going to have the opportunity to say “yeah, I went to England for Fall Break.” (Probably not many, so I’m grabbing the chance when I’ve got it.)
Anyhow, I’m here visiting Chase, because he’s studying abroad in Nottingham.1
I’m actually not doing a whole lot while I’m here – I tend to prefer to just sit around and work on my own projects, or sit around and be lazy as my ‘vacation’ time. I spent yesterday wandering around the campus,2 and today I’m hoping to find a coffee shop or something where I can just sit around and work on my laptop for a few hours.3
Sunday, though, Chase dragged me to a nearby park to take some photos, because he’s even more of a photography nerd than I am. It was pretty cool, though – turns out that the park has a mansion that served as Wayne Manor in the Nolan Batman trilogy.
What’s that? You want pictures? Alright, I can do that.

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Austria

“Lower Austria,” or, “kids in the 1920s clearly didn’t have enough to do”

Didn’t actually manage to write this one on the plane, or on the several-hour-long bus ride from London to Nottingham, but oh well. I’m still in the wrong time zone, so I’m up early, may as well do something productive.
Anyhow, this past Friday was another Planned Outing day. We hopped into a van1 that took us out into what I shall affectionately refer to as “the Middle of Nowhere, Lower Austria.”

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Austria

“St. Stephen’s,” or, “wait, how DO you pluralize ‘Jesus’?”

I’m behind and getting more behind, but hopefully I can get some of this stuff written on my flight and get a bit less behind.1
Anyhow, our tour this week was to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the big ol’ church in the center of town. If you’ve been following along, you’ve already seen a picture of the outside at least once – it’s rather impressive.2
I’m actually going to go a bit out of order for this one. Usually I try to keep everything in chronological order, so the reader can follow along and have a nice sense of immersion.3 This time, though, I’m going to start with where we ended, because I love gothic architecture and I’d quite like to save the best for last.
So, without further ado, the photos:4

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Austria Czech Republic

“Prague,” or, “Sigmund Freud get down from there you aren’t a cat”

We’re on a bus back from Prague!1 The last three days were spent wandering around the city, taking part in a series of tours where more information than I know what to do with was poured into my brain.2 For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to divide this into a few sections, because after three days I have a solid amount of photos to share.

Day One

The first day, we were up early to catch our bus from Vienna to Prague. And then we sat on a bus for a few hours. Turns out that if you have a T-Mobile plan that you bought in Austria, it doesn’t work in other countries, but if you have a T-Mobile plan that you bought in the US, it’ll work anywhere in Europe. Thanks, T-Mobile, for being a horrible mess. So the bus ride was less productive than I’d hoped.3
But you’re not here to read my complaints about the inexplicable tangle that is international cell phone networks, you’re here for pretty pictures.4 So, without further ado, off we go:

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Austria

“Schottenstift,” or, “there’s only like 30,000 books on there, I counted”

Our tour1 this week was to Schottenstift, a monastery founded in 1155 by… Irish monks. Yes, Irish, though name does translate as “Scottish Abbey.”2 I finally got myself a locker in the Institute, because last week I was very irritated by carrying around both my camera and my backpack the whole time. Definitely a good investment. Future students: get a locker, they’re useful.
Alright, alright, I know what you’re all actually here to see, the pictures:

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Austria

“UN,” or, “this architecture is a distillation of what the UN itself is”

September 21st is the International Day of Peace. It was declared as such by the United Nations General Assembly in 1981, and has been a symbol of ongoing efforts to create true, lasting, world peace ever since.
Paris and I had the opportunity to help out with an event discussing the United Nations’ goal of “Peace and Sustainable Development” this past Friday. It was quite an experience – we both wound up tweeting a lot, which you can see here, and overall we enjoyed the experience.
While a lot of it was panel discussions, which aren’t exactly my photographic forte, the event was held in the Vienna International Center. It’s not super easy to get in there – the security is pretty tight, considering that it’s one of the UN’s three world headquarters. I figured I’d take advantage of being allowed in and snap a few pictures of the grounds.

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Austria

Sonntag

So, last Sunday1 Alyssa and I ventured around the Ringstraße a bit. I’ve got a whole list of things to go see on the Ring, and we wanted to check a couple of them off.2
A historical note: the Ring was constructed under Emperor Franz Joseph II, following the lines of what used to be the city walls. As part of that construction, quite a few other notable buildings were put up, at a scale that makes me assume that Franz Joseph II had figured out the cheat codes for whichever version of Civilization it is that our world is running on.3
Now, without further ado, the pictures:

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Austria

Zentralfriedhof

Austria,1 in case you’re not aware, has a bit of a reputation for being the center of music culture. There’s a reason it’s referred to as the Viennese School, after all. So it’s a bit understandable that I, being a music major, wound up doing my study abroad program here.
What does that have to do with the title?
Nothing, yet. See, the title is the name of the biggest cemetery in the city – it translates literally as “Central Cemetery.”
Now, one thing about the Great Composers of History is that they were… in history. As in, a long time ago. And since we have yet to invent a cure for death, they’re all. Well. Dead. What’s a music major to do if they want to see the greats?
You go to a cemetery, of course. And, being the camera-toting sort, you take pictures of some of the rather impressive graves.

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Austria

Aquarium

I promised another post, and here it is. I’m hoping once we get down into the pictures1 you’ll see why I broke it into its own thing.
We went to the aquarium.
It wasn’t really a planned thing – we were trying to find a shop somewhere and got a bit lost, and when we were looking for distinctive landmarks the aquarium was the biggest thing we could see. It’s rather noticeable:2
Still of the Night
I’d previously mentioned the flak towers of Vienna, and even made a reference to the fact that one had been converted into an aquarium. This is the one.3 And I’ll say right now, before I get into actually showing you what all there was to see, that this is has become the absolute top of my “things to do in Vienna” list.4 Seriously, it’s an incredible aquarium/zoo, with a fascinating history and some stellar views. If you’re ever in Vienna, I cannot recommend it enough.
Now, pictures:

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Austria

Romans

All three of our history/politics classes are now in session, the first of the other study abroad groups1 have arrived, and our weekly field trips around Vienna have begun – school is well and truly in session now, folks.
As an aside, the blog post for this week will arrive in two parts – this, the first, showing a bit of our academic exploration of Vienna, and the second will show up sometime soon. I had a lot of pictures from my own explorations this week, so it’s going to take me a while to get them all in order.
But now, on to the photos:

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Austria

Schönbrunn

Once again, we’ve had quite a busy week. If I’m remembering the schedule properly,1 we’re now done with the ‘Conversation’ component of our Survival German classes and are moving into the Grammar unit. I’m excited – historically, I do better with a language by learning the grammatical structures than I do trying to memorize specific instances of those rules.
The other big thing we did this week was our district presentations – something that faithful readers have already seen a hint of. To be honest, there wasn’t much more to the presentations than what you can see in the aforelinked2 blog post, but for the presentations we had a more captive audience than anyone here reading is.
That said, once the weekend hit, we split up a bit: I know that there’s a group, as I write this, hopping on a bus back from Bratislava, and Paris, Sierra, and I headed over to Schönbrunn3 to explore the park.

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Education Travel

“Neural Audio,” or, “What I Did This Summer”

I’ve had a few people1 ask me what, exactly, I was doing all summer, off in Louisiana. As a programmer, being efficient is sort of the goal of everything I do; as such, doing a single write-up here and then sending that link to people makes more sense than answer the question over and over.2
I spent the summer working at a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates at the Center for Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University.3 It’s a pretty cool setup they’ve got at the CCT4 – it’s not an academic unit, it’s a research group only. The building has all sorts of handy resources – all of us in the program had access to both a shared workspace for the REU students and our own individual workrooms, which varied depending on our project.5 The exciting new thing for me was the server room, which I had access to.6 There were a few machines of interest in there – HIVE, a cluster-in-progress that was devoted entirely towards art that required high-powered computation, and Titan, a machine designed for use with neural networks.
This is where I lead in to my specific research program, which wound up being titled “Neural Audio,” as above.7 The goal was basically an exploration of the use of deep neural networks for music information retrieval.
Whoops, went a bit jargon-heavy. Let’s break it down.

Deep Neural Networks

You may have heard about this one before – neural networks are the current big thing in artificial intelligence. Google uses them to power a lot of things, but the big one people have heard about is Google Photos, where deep neural networks provide the incredible search features.8 As you might guess from the name, they’re based off the structure of the human brain:9 a bunch of nodes, connected by weighted edges, which are the neurons and synapses of the artificial brain.10 Now, what’s cool about machine learning is the training: instead of sitting down and writing an algorithm to perform a task, you just build up a big data set of questions and their paired answers. Then you feed it into the system, and it learns11 how to answer the questions.
Of course, it’s not that open-ended- you can’t drop the works of Shakespeare in there and expect it to write a paper analyzing his writing style.12 They work best with categorization – you give them a set number of categories, and the network can tell you either which category something belongs to, or the percentage chance that thing falls into each category.13
Beyond that, there’s nothing fancy about neural networks – they’re just a software construct used to do a heck of a lot of math, the end result of which is an algorithm that no human could’ve designed. Cool stuff.

Music Information Retrieval

The field of MIR isn’t new, they’ve been around for a while doing cool things. It really does what it says on the tin: the idea is to be able to feed a piece of music into the software and receive useful information about the music out. Software that can recognize the key of a song being played or identify the speed at which the piece is being performed are good examples of this.14

Combining Them

My work was basically looking into combining these two fields. Machine learning can do some cool stuff, the idea went, so why not try applying it to music?
This took two forms: trying to identify the genre of a piece, and trying to identify the instruments playing in a piece.
It’s here that I’m going to hand off the explanation to another thing I was working on this summer, though as a test subject rather than a researcher: the digital poster. One of the other research groups at the CCT was working on a system to modernize the poster presentation, a staple of scientific conferences. I had the opportunity to be one of the trial-run students for the digital poster, and wound up putting together an online version as my way of wireframing what the final product would look like. Being me, I made my wireframe look just as good as the ‘official’ one, and wound up posting the whole thing online and providing a QR code on the paper poster15 that linked to the online site.

Wrap-Up

While the summer, and thus the time I had at LSU, came to an end, the work didn’t. I’m still16 trading emails with my mentor, and I’m hopefully going to be attending another conference at some point to talk about my work. In the interim, I hope to be able to get some additional work done, maybe get some more interesting data out of the machines. It’s a goal, and time will tell how well I’m able to accomplish it.
That’s about all I’m going to write here – if you want to know more, you can check out the digital poster, and if that doesn’t get you enough information, you can fire me an email, it’s grey (at) this site.17

  1. Reasonably ↩
  2. If I were teaching a computer science course, the first thing I’d say would be along the lines of “‘efficiency’ is just a codeword for ‘laziness that won’t get you fired.’” ↩
  3. Or “LSU CCT NSF REU” for out-of-order short. ↩
  4. I hope you read the last footnote, because I’m going to be using these short-forms of the names throughout. Efficiency! ↩
  5. One person had a few offices shared with graduate students working on the same program; another had a Mac lab to themselves; I was given the key to a media lab on another floor. ↩
  6. I found this oddly entertaining after I had to let one of the IT staff in there to reboot a server following a power failure. ↩
  7. I kept trying to make it “neural audio,” because I’m a millenial and thus hate capital letters, but I was overruled by my mentor. Probably for the best. ↩
  8. Seriously, the fact that I can search for someone’s name and have it accurately spit out a list of every photo I’ve taken with them in it is seriously impressive. The fact that I can ask for stuff like “mountain” or “car” and also get accurate results? Mind-blowing. ↩
  9. Though, it’s important to note that they’re not based off an accurate/current idea of how the human brain works; we’re computer scientists, not biologists. ↩
  10. The weighting of the edges is important, as that’s where all the magic happens. Each node, simplified down, is performing an averaging operation over all of its inputs. The output is then passed along the edges, and transformed by the weight of that edge, creating the new input for the next node. ↩
  11. Using a system called Stochastic Gradient Descent, which I find to be a very elegant solution the problem. (I recommend reading the previous footnote before this one.) Learning, via training goes like this: you feed the network an input, and the randomized initial weights do the processing and spit out an answer. That’s probably not the right answer, so the network will change the weights in a random ‘direction,’ and then try again. If it’s closer to the right answer, the network will change the weights in that direction again; if it was further away, it’ll try a different direction. The process of training is just repeating that operation over and over and over again. ↩
  12. Although, entertainingly, you can drop the entire works of Shakespeare into a neural network and have it make a spirited attempt at creating a new work in the style of Shakespeare. ↩
  13. That’s called softmax, and it’s pretty handy. I looked at using changing softmax results over time as a way of extracting metadata from music. ↩
  14. Entertainingly, some of the best examples of MIR arguably aren’t MIR at all: Gracenote, for example, the system that allows the ‘smart’ stereo systems in cars to figure out what CD you’ve just put in, is based on a ‘CD fingerprint’ that looks at the length of the tracks and when each one starts. It is possible, with a lot of effort, to design a CD that will show up as being something entirely different than it actually is. ↩
  15. We were all required to make traditional paper posters, regardless of our use of digital posters. ↩
  16. Infrequently, because time zones. ↩
  17. I’m not dumb enough to put my email address up on the open web, c’mon. I already get way too much spam email. ↩