Jānis Lībeks (Janis Libeks)
Department of Computer Science
40 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 2E4
Email: libeks@dgp.toronto.edu
About
I am interested in computer vision and computer graphics, especially when applied to modelling the perception of aesthetics. I'm currently a masters student in Computer Science as part of the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Aaron Hertzmann.
News
(May 2012) I am spending the summer at Adobe in Seattle, doing research on typefaces with Aseem Agarwala.
Research
During my senior year at Swarthmore, I participated in two research projects.
-
Musical genre from artist images and Artist Image Browser
with Douglas Turnbull
This project tries to explore the information encoded in artist images that provide hints to the artist's musical genre. By applying state-of-the-art image similarity algorithms on artist album covers as well as promotional photos obtained from Last.fm, we were able to automatically predict the artist's musical genre. The results of our system are comparable to humans when they do not recognize the artist.
We present some part of our dataset in the Artist Image Browser.
- PeerMon
with Tia Newhall, Ross Greenwood, Jeff Knerr
We explore the use of a peer-to-peer monitoring system for a local area network to indentify underused nodes to use for various purposes. The resulting system provides a flexible, reliable decentralized network of information exchange that can be used to find the most appropriate nodes for large scale computations on academic networks that are partially utilized around the clock.
Publications
"You Can Judge an Artist by an Album Cover: Using Images for Music Annotation",
Jānis Lībeks, Douglas Turnbull,
IEEE MultiMedia, pp. 30-37, October-December, 2011 pre-print version [PDF]"PeerMon: A Peer-to-Peer Network Monitoring System",
Tia Newhall, Jānis Lībeks, Ross Greenwood, Jeff Knerr,
Proceedings of USENIX 24th Large Installation System Administration Conference, November 2010 paper [PDF]"Exploring 'Artist Image' Using Content-Based Analysis of Promotional Photos",
Jānis Lībeks, Douglas Turnbull,
Proceedings of International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) 2010, June 2010 paper [PDF], presentation [PDF].
Background
I was born in Rīga, Latvia. I attended Riga Centre Language School and Riga State Gymnasium No.1. In 2006 I headed over to
Swarthmore, PA, USA, to attend Swarthmore College.
Some of my interests include recreational astronomy (I was part of an Astronomy Club for 5 years in Latvia), languages (I speak English and Latvian
fluently, I also understand German, Russian and Japanese to some degree). I spent a semester studying abroad in Kyoto, Japan in the Fall of 2008 as
part of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies.
During college I've worked as a computer tech support person, as well as a grader and teacher's assistant for various Computer Science courses.
I have worked as a software developer for Epic Systems Corporation.