About Me

 
 

WORK: I work as an applied mathematician and CTO for a facial recognition startup company called Animetrics, founded by my doctoral advisor Michael Miller.  We work on algorithms that solve the vision problem for faces (i.e. reconstructing facial surfaces in 3D from one or more photographs), and we develop facial recognition algorithms for automatic identification and verification from photographs and video. This technology is useful in forensics, the entertainment and gaming industry, Department of Defense, and general security applications. Most of my software development is done in C++–with Objective C a close second–but I also help design and manage web based architectures written in PHP, Javascript, and Flash, as well as SOAP and REST web services.


EDUCATION: My degrees are from Johns Hopkins University in Biomedical Engineering, with concentrations in pure and applied mathematics, and electrical engineering. My thesis developed a variational framework for matching surfaces--appropriate for non-linear deformations including diffeomorphisms--using currents from geometric measure theory. A concise paper (IPMI 2005) which covers much of the content can be found here.


HOBBIES: My hobbies include Ham radio (QRP and CW), sailing, skating (ice, inline), iphone programming/hacking, and--in general--most things Unix-related. My Ham radio call sign is kb1ooo, which is usually the nickname I use in forums and IRC.


PERSONAL PROJECTS:


 


PERSONAL SOFTWARE PROJECTS:


Authored projects:


   
   

iDitDahText     Snappy    FastPhotoLibrary


Contributed projects:


                 

 

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iDitDahText:  Fast text entry for the iphone using Morse code.  Please see the iDitDahText main page for more information and a video demonstration.


Snappy: A camera app for the iphone that launches quickly without having to exit your currently running application.  Please see the Snappy main page more more information and a video demonstration.


FastPhotoLibrary: A photo viewer app for the iphone and ipod touch that--like snappy--launches quickly without having to exit your currently running application.  Please see the FastPhotoLibrary main page for more information and a video demonstration.


I have also contributed to the following projects:  


QRQ: RUFZ contest trainer clone by DJ1YFK

Fabian Kurz (DJ1YFK) wrote a RUFZ contest trainer clone for Linux and other UNIX systems that support the OSS audio api. I extended compatibility to UNIX systems that support the OpenAL audio api, since I’m a mac user and OS X doesn’t have native support for OSS. A build of QRQ for OS X can be found here.


CWIRC: CW (Morse code) over IRC by F8EJF

Pierre Coupard (F8EJF) wrote a plugin for X-Chat called CWIRC that allows you to send and receive Morse code (CW) over Internet Relay Chat (IRC).  This is useful for learning CW because you can have conversations (QSOs) without the pressures of Ham radio. (You don’t have to be a ham or adhere to protocol, and you have the regular text chat to fall back on.)  As with QRQ, CWIRC works with OSS so I also ported the audio to work in OS X. This port is not officially released because the audio library I used is now deprecated, although it still works. If you are interested, please contact me.

Marc Vaillant

kb1ooo