Educator. Engineer. Experimenter.
We published a new paper on estimating clear sky energy across the entire skydome. Wide spectrum sky energy is useful for many downstream applications, including PV building energy modeling, panel alignment, rendering, etc. This is a data-driven technique, using regression models on measured sky data. We validated the method with holdout data and with libRadtran,…
Participated in the UCF Graduate Research Forum this year. Hundreds of graduate students presented some of their research in poster format, in a ballroom at the student union. Judges came by and delved into the topic with each participant. It was really nice to see so many budding scientists and so much interest work taking…
Built a new mid-range PC for ~$600 for my dad for his birthday. He mostly uses it for video streaming, the Internet, and office work, so… no separate video card 🙂 I could have saved money on a few things, but wanted high quality parts. The case for instance was pricey, but he wanted something…
Think like an amateur. Do as an expert. – Takeo Kanade I got a chance to see Takeo Kanade talk today at UCF. He was fantastic! Takeo Kanade is one of the highest ranked/cited computer scientists on computer vision and robotics. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. He talked about various projects he worked on…
Not Neko Case (no disrespect). Nicky Case, and the quality of their work, passion, and humanity. But let’s just say if the world was ending and we could only choose 100 living people to represent Earthlings, I’m pretty sure I’d like Nicky to be on that list (after me, because I don’t want to die)….
Here are some photos from Otronicon 2017 at the Orlando Science Center. My non-profit, Cacti Council, had a booth as well. We meet with K-12 students, faculty, administrators and clubs, sometimes with university student volunteers, to promote logic, computer science, and programming topics. At Otronicon, we were building simple games with Google IgniteCS Here is…
Photogrammetry is the process of using images for measurement or 3D model reconstruction. Here is a great article by Gaétan Laure on using a custom drone with a GoPro camera and Agisoft Photoscan to produce a 3D reconstruction of a house. I’ve been working on a project with photogrammetry from images taken by a DJI…
Various resources to help you appreciate Ada, Countess of Lovelace as certainly one of the first, if not the very first, documented programmer for a general purpose computing machine. Numbers of Bernoulli program intended for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/figures/menat6_1-5k.png http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html (Note that Ada’s “Notes” are much longer than the original translation itself) (I thank…
A literal cacti council to celebrate our Cacti Council non-profit, which promotes creative and critical thinking concepts in education, especially computer science and its related disciplines. If you’d like to help out and/or be involved, let us know here.
Here is some code for a simple multilayer perceptron back-propagating neural network that I wrote in graduate school. There are much more complete, powerful frameworks being developed, but perhaps this will help someone learning. Feel free to use any code that you want. https://github.com/delrocco/mlp-bpnn https://github.com/delrocco/mlp-bpnn/blob/master/results/ExperiementsBPNN_DelRocco.pdf