## Fijnstofalarm winner of ‘Apps voor Eindhoven Challenge’

On June 10th, a symposium on Open Data was held in the stadhuis (city hall) of Eindhoven. I wrote about this symposium in another post (in Dutch). Several months ahead of this symposium, an app challenge was announced. The most important rule for this challenge was that an entry for this challenge should make use of open data related to Eindhoven. My entry was . During the symposium, prize winners of the challenge were announced.

Fijnstofalarm was awarded the 1st prize in the category for individuals! According to the jury, Fijnstofalarm won by a clear margin. The prize was worth 1000 euros.

Pictures

## The university dungeons

The stackroom library in the basement of the main building: not a place that you want to visit regularly! Perhaps that’s why it’s only accessible for 1.5 hours each day. 🙂

Research

## Improving region-bound seam carving

I found this small research paper (PDF, 11.7 MB) that I wrote last year about seam carving, colloquially known as ‘content-aware image resizing’, lingering on my laptop. Last year, I did some research on how to improve the original seam carving method devised by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. If you’re not familiar with seam carving, you should definitely watch this video.

One way to improve seam carving is by partitioning an image into separate regions, or ‘region-bound seam carving’ as we dubbed it. Seams can then be bound to horizontal or vertical regions to make sure that they follow a relatively straight path. Region-bound seam carving performed quite well, but left room for improvement as well. That’s why I came up with 2-dimensional region-bound seam carving.

In regular region-based seam carving, an image with width $n$ and height $m$, each pixel $p_{x,y}$ can be assigned a horizontal and vertical region class $R_{x}$ and $R_{y}$ using the following formulae:

$R_{x}(p_{x,y}) = \frac{1}{r} \lfloor \frac{r}{n} \displaystyle\sum\limits_{i=0}^{n-1} e_{local}(p_{i,y}) \rfloor$
$R_{y}(p_{x,y}) = \frac{1}{r} \lfloor \frac{r}{m} \displaystyle\sum\limits_{i=0}^{m-1} e_{local}(p_{x,i}) \rfloor$.

## Buienalarm op een na populairste Nederlandse app

Posted in Dutch.

Recentelijk heeft Androidworld een top 15 uitgebracht van Android-applicaties die ontwikkeld zijn door Nederlandse ontwikkelaars. Deze lijst is samengesteld nadat een kleine 1500 Nederlandse Android-gebruikers een stem hebben uitgebracht op hun favoriete Android-applicatie. Buienalarm is hierbij geëindigd op de 2e plek, na de applicatie van NU.nl! Dit is natuurlijk iets om hartstikke trots op te zijn. 🙂 Iedereen die op Buienalarm heeft gestemd: bedankt!

Voor de volledigheid volgt hier de complete lijst:

1. NU.nl
2. Buienalarm
3. Rabobank Bankieren
5. Buitenbeter
6. ABN AMRO Saldo
7. Appie van Albert Heijn
8. NOS Teletekst
9. NS Reisplanner Xtra
10. Layar Reality Browser
11. Android TreinTijden