Dictionary Learning and Slopes

The meeting I am attending is actually pretty productive. It might be more productive if the lunch break was a bit shorter, but it is productive in any case. Yesterday, during the “lunch break” I went skiing. After changing clothes, renting ski equipment and traveling up to the slopes via train, I was on the slopes for more than three hours. I then took a train back down, returned my ski equipment, changed clothes, and made it back to the meeting just before the end of the lunch break.

It was a lot of fun. I fell only three times, although one was a doozy (see comments on previous post). I was skiing rather well by the end of the day. I stuck to the blue slopes (which are the easiest, equivalent to greens in the USA) and spent most of the day skiing on my own. There were two options amongst the mathematicians: ski school for beginners or skiing with two very good skiers. The two good skiers agreed to take me down a blue run at first and then go their own way. I thought this was very nice of them and opted for that approach. It was helpful. Ivan had to bring me a ski on two occasions.

There is actually some math going on here as well. Several good projects have been identified and we are now broken into groups of three or four and formulating a work plan to complete these projects. I am working on a theoretical project regarding localized dictionaries and the implications for signal reconstruction from the analysis coefficients versus the synthesis coefficients. If all goes well, there should be a paper in a few months for you to read.