fluxcapacity

In fact, our own Vikas Reddy was the first TechStars founder to pull out the moves last night on one of the locals.  This left me in a circle of (mostly) guys, sipping a Tahona Margarita, and pondering how the team from Ignighter, a group-focused dating system, could have been shown up by a solo lanky guy in a Simpson’s T-shirt.  Just a few hours later, Ignighter beat me to it, and is already analyzing the replay footage.

Another reason we hopefully don’t suck is that we’re one of the TechStars’ Ten companies of 2008.  TechStars is the creation of David Cohen, Brad Feld and co.  In one of the first sessions this past week, David had everyone in the room give an example of what they suck at, and Brad shared his experiences with the concept of sucking (or sucking less than the competition).

I think that if we expand on this concept both individually and as a team, and we suck less every day, then we’ll have something to be happy about.  So “sucking less every day” is our new tagline for now.

I’ll close by mentioning that Shun currently sucks at identifying beer in the fridge.  On Thursday he sat down at his desk after migrating around the office looking for something to drink and cracked open a can of Dale’s Pale Ale.  I think he thought it was a new kind of cola, because you should have seen the expression on his face when he said “Is this beer?”

Yep, sure is.

Abhishek Gandhi will also be joining Fluxcapacity later this month as a summer intern. He is a master’s student at Columbia University who has studied computer vision and artificial intelligence, among other things.

His resume is impressive and we could really sense his passion for computer vision. He is able to think on his feet – during his interview he invented a new set of symbols to express conditional probability, since it’d been a while since he used more traditional ones.

Recently, Abhishek has been working in augmented reality (AR).

Left: Here, Abhishek uses ARToolkit and XNA to correctly position virtual cubes. Right: 3D pose is estimated without the need for specialized markers.

Abhishek likes foreign language films, good books, and hikes around the parks to escape from the city. Both Abhishek and Shun are going to do some amazing things this summer. Until then, good luck to them on their finals!

We were lucky enough to have a lot of interest for our intern positions. Last month was filled with interviews. There were simply no bad candidates, and we had to make some tough choices. We're set with interns for now, but we're perpetually interested in finding the perfect team.

The latest buzz is that a fourth fundamental circuit element has been fabricated. Dubbed the Memristor, it's a two-terminal device that acts like a resistor with a time-varying magnetic flux derivative with a memory effect. When you charge it up, you change the flux. That's right, a flux capacitor, and some others agree. The actual function is a characteristic of how much charge your flux capacitor can handle.

So now the only questions is, how are you going to use your flux capacitor? The inventor of memristors suggests building large artificial neural networks. Any ideas for what we should call those?

We found Shun at Columbia University, where he's a master's student of computer science in the vision and graphics track.

Shun has worked on a lot of interesting projects, but what we thought was especially cool was his work with Professor Aoki at Tohoku University in Japan. There he designed a system using a projector and stereo camera that compensates for the photometric characteristics of a projected surface. What that means is that using what Shun's lab created you can use a projector with a non-white and non-uniform surface, like a brick wall, and still have it look good! Here's an example:

From left to right are the display surface, the original image, the image projected onto the display surface without compensation, the compensated image, and the compensated image projected onto the display surface.

When he's not working on hard computer vision problems, you can probably find Shun taking long walks around the city to clear his mind.

Shun really impressed us during the interview with his quick and creative responses to our tough algorithm question. He was even prepared with his old research paper when we asked about interesting projects that he had worked on. We are thrilled to work with him this summer.

A lot has changed in the last few months. We want to mention that Adam Herscher left in early January to pursue other opportunities. We wish him the best. More news coming soon.