My Top 10 Foods in Taiwan

One of my father's British friends once told me: "We English people eat to live, but you Taiwanese people live to eat!". THIS IS SO TRUE! Here I would like to share with you my top 10 foods of Taiwan. I will make this list longer if I have more time.

1.	Bubble Tea
		Bubble tea should be called pearl milk tea to match its original name in Chinese. There are many bubble tea shops in Taiwan, but the best is Ten Ren tea. Unlike other shops, Ten Ren also sells high quality tea. Their bubble tea is more expensive but taste different with better tea leaves. They also have several restaurant in Shi-Lin that use tea as ingredient in their dishes, which are tasty and special. The secret of best bubble tea is customization. You can decide how much sugar or ice you want. I usually have 1/3 sugar and less ice.
2.	Din Tai Fung
		My favorite restaurant! Din Tai Fung is best known for steamed dumplings, but I want to say that all foods they sold are good. My favorite steamed dumpling is the one with shrimp and loofah. The spicy dumpling and fried rice are also very delicious. Din Tai Feng can be found in the SOGO department stores. It's hard to miss it with so many chefs making dumpling in the window.
3.	Beef Noodle
		One of the most famous foods in Taiwan! There is even a beef noodle festival in Taiwan. For beef noodle I prefer local restaurants like Lin Dong Fang Beef Noodle or tomato beef noodle in my neighborhood (Tian-Mu). The beef noodle of Din Tai Fung is also good.
4.	Mango Shaved Ice
		Mango is a super juicy and sweet fruit native to South Asia. Mango and shaved ice (sometimes with ice cream) are a perfect combination. However the best season to have mango is summer.
5.	Fried Chicken & Squid
		Fried chicken and squid are most popular food in night market. Taiwanese fried chicken is also called popcorn chicken. It consists of bite-sized pieces of chicken, coated and fried with flour and seasoning mixture. But I don't eat it very often because it is high-fat and deep-fried. It's so delicious and so evil.
6.	Braised Pork Rice
		Braised pork rice, or minced pork rice, is a Taiwanese traditional food. This is a steamed rice with ground pork marinated and boiled in soy sauce served on top. Formosa Chang serves very good braised pork rice. Their chicken rice is also worth a try.
7.	Pineapple Cake
		Pineapple cake is a pastry containing butter, flour, egg, sugar, and pineapple or white gourd jam. It is sweet and best have it with tea.
8.	Oyster Omelet
		This is one of the most common dish in night market. Fresh oyster fried with eggs is yummy, and I like to add sweet-spicy sauce.
9.	Pig-blood Rice Cake
		Don't be scared by its name. Pig-blood rice cake is made by rice but use pig's or duck's blood for seasoning. Okay, maybe it still sounds scared, but it tastes like a rice cake. Once being selected as weirdest food in the world by Virtual Tourist, pig-blood cake is a good choice for adventurous tourists.
10.	Stinky Tofu
		Best choice for adventurous tourists. It smells stinky but tastes very good. Honestly speaking, I seldom eat it. Stinky tofu is also popular in China.

Reference

1. CNN Travel - 40 of the best Taiwanese foods and drinks
2. CNN Travel - You voted: World's best food is in ..
3. Travel Taipei - Must Eat in Taiwan!
4. https://tw.blog.voicetube.com/archives/9125

Use Deep Learning Tool inside Unreal

In this post I would like to introduce how to setup Unreal as a deep reinforcement learning environment. Before going on please get your deep learning environment ready and install TensorFlow or Theano. Our environment is based on the amazing Unreal Python Engine created by 20tab:
https://github.com/20tab/UnrealEnginePython

I've successfully installed on Ubuntu, Windows and Mac. Installing on Windows & Mac are relatively easy so let's start with Ubuntu first.

Ubuntu

1. Installing Unreal

First you need to register an account on EpicGame website. For linux we need to compile from source code.  Make sure you get granted for downloading from github then execute the commands below:

# Get authorized on github by EpicGames first. 
# Can use -b to specify UE4 version. Ex: git clone -b 4.16
git clone https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine.git
cd UnrealEngine
./Setup.sh
./GenerateProjectFiles.sh
make
#....wait for 30+ mins....
# Run UE4 editor
./Engine/Binaries/Linux/UE4Editor

1.1 Unreal Terminology

There are some must-know terminologies of Unreal:

LEVEL: A gaming region, saved as (.umap) so it's also called Map	ACTOR: Any movable object in a level
PAWN: Subclass of Actor controlled by player or AI (NPC)	BLUEPRINT: Visual game scripting system

More terminologies can be found here.

1.2 Learning Unreal Basics

To create your own test environment you need to learn how to manipulate objects (actors) and write scripts. There are lots of tutorials on Unreal website and I suggest to read the following first:

a. Level Designer Quick Start

b. Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial for Beginners: Getting Started

c. Blueprints Quick Start Guide


NOTE: Unfortunately there is no Epic Games launcher for Linux, so we need to download free examples using Windows or Mac and then upload to Linux.

2. Installing UnrealPythonEngine

Now we need to install the UnrealPythonEngine plugin from
https://github.com/20tab/UnrealEnginePython
By default Unreal will load and compile any plugs in /Plugins folder under the project directory. Note we need to create C++ project, not Blueprint:

The installation steps are listed as below:

• Create a new Unreal C++ project and close the editor once the project is fully started
• Go to the just created project directory and create the Plugins folder
• move to the Plugins folder and clone the UnrealPythonEngine plugin:

git clone https://github.com/20tab/UnrealEnginePython

Before we re-open Unreal project and compile the plugin, we need to setup Python engine first.

2.1 Choose Python 2.7 or Python 3.5+

The default Python engine is 3.6. To change it we need to edit the build file:

Plugins/UnrealEnginePython/Source/UnrealEnginePython/UnrealEnginePython.Build.cs

And add your Python installation folder into pythonHome as below:

public class UnrealEnginePython : ModuleRules
{ 
  
    // leave this string as empty for triggering auto-discovery of python installations...
    private string pythonHome = "/usr/include/python2.7;/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpython2.7.so";
    ......

Reopen the project and start compiling the plugin, a "not compatible" warning message may be shown:

Ignore the warning and click "No", and you will see the next dialog

Click "Yes"

*Compiling error for UnrealPythonEngine

If you are using clang++-3.9 and older Unreal version (like 4.15) to compile UnrealPythonEngine, you will encounter the following error:

ThirdParty/FBX/2016.1.1/include/fbxsdk/core/fbxproperty.h:1242:70: error: binding dereferenced null pointer to reference has undefined behavior [-Werror,-Wnull-dereference] return StaticInit(pObject, pName, FbxGetDataTypeFromEnum(FbxTypeOf(*((FbxReference*)0))), pValue, pForceSet, pFlags); 

To fix it, change your clang++ version to 3.8 or lower:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang++ clang++ /usr/bin/clang++-3.8 100
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang clang /usr/bin/clang-3.8 100

2.2 Open Python Console

Now we are ready to run some Python scripts. Make sure your deep learning tool (TensorFlow or Theano) is accessiable for the UE4Editor. If VirtualEnv is used, activate the environment before running UE4, for example:

/data/UnrealEngine-4.17$ source ~/theano/bin/activate
(theano) /data/UnrealEngine-4.17$ ./Engine/Binaries/Linux/UE4Editor

Open the Unreal project and select Window -> Developer Tool -> Python Console

Import your Deep Learning framework, then you are ready to go!

Windows & Mac

For Windows and Mac, just download the binary releases from Github of UnrealPythonEngine and unzip it in your project's Plugins folder. Make sure you download the right Python version.

Top Conferences in Data Mining, Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence

Note: The conferences are sorted by deadline.

Data Mining

Short Name	Full Name	Deadline	When
KDD	Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining	February	August
ASONAM	Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining	March	July/Aug.
ECML + PKDD	The European Conference on Machine Learning & Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases	April	September
CIKM	IEEE International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management	May	November
ICDM	IEEE International Conference on Data Mining	June	November
WSDM	Web Search and Data Mining	August	February
ICDE	International Conference on Data Engineering	Sep./Oct.	April
SDM	SIAM International Conference on Data Mining	October	May
PAKDD	The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining	Oct./Nov.	May

Computer Vision & Image Processing

Short Name	Full Name	Deadline	When
ICIP	International Conference on Image Processing	January	September
SIGGRAPH	Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques	January	August
ICPR	International Conference on Pattern Recognition #	January	August
ECCV	European Conference on Computer Vision#	February	September
ICCV	International Conference on Computer Vision*	March	October
ACM MM	ACM International Conference on Multimedia	April	October
BMVC	British Machine Vision Conference	May	September
CVPR	Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition	November	June/July
ICME	International Conference on Multimedia and Expo	December	July

# Every even year  * Every odd year

Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

Short Name	Full Name	Deadline	When
IJCAI	International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence	February	August
ICML	International Conference on Machine Learning	February	August
NIPS	Neural Information Processing Systems Conference	May	December
AAAI	American Association for AI National Conference	September	February
ICLR	International Conference on Leanring Representations	October	April/May

Robotics

Short Name	Full Name	Deadline	When
IROS	International Conference on Intelligent Robots & Systems	March	September
ICRA	International Conference on Robotics and Automation	September	May

Deep Learning Reading List (Tools, Tutorials, Papers)

Deep Learning Fundamentals
R. Pieters	Python for image understanding link	A good talk for beginners
Chih-Fan Hsu, Chun-Ming Chang	手把手的深度學習實務 (slides) (labs) (github)	Great training course in Chinese, made by Data Insights Research Lab in Academia Sinica
Neural networks and deep learnings	neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com	A very comprehensive tutorial written by Michael Nielsen
Christopher Olah	colah.github.io	A good blog to visualize NN
Geoffrey E. Hinton et al.	A fast learning algorithm for deep belief nets, Neural computation, 2006	The breakthrough paper that introduces restricted Boltzmann machines and stacked deep-belief networks
Y LeCun, Y Bengio, G Hinton	Deep Learning, Nature, 2015	Review paper written by fathers of neural networks
Deep Learning Tools
TensorFlow	www.tensorflow.org	Open source library developed by Google with C++ core and Python interface
Keras	keras.io	A wrapper for Theano and Tensorflow, very user friendly.
Theano	deeplearning.net/software/theano	DL library for Python developed by Université de Montréal
Caffe2	github.com/caffe2/caffe2	A fast and scalable C++ DL framework for visual recognition. Based on Caffe from UC Berkely
Deep Reinforcement Learning
Tambet Matiisen	Demystifying Deep Reinforcement Learning	Great introduction. Algorithms are implemented with Neon
Arhtur Juliani	Simple Reinforcement Learning with TensorFlow (Q learning)
Open AI Gym	gym.openai.com	A framework let your RL algorithms play video games
Mnih, et al.	Human-Level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning, Nature, 2015	Deep Q-network (DQN) by Google Deep Mind (code)
David Sliver, Aja Huang et al.	Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search, Nature 2016	Paper of AlphaGo, period.
DL for Image Classification and Object Detection
ImageNet	An image database with 14 million images organized according to the WordNet hierarchy	Hold the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) challenges every year
Alex Krizhevsky Ilya Sutskever Geoffrey E. Hinton	ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, NIPS 2012	First successful deep network for image classification, aka AlexNet
Karen Simonyan, Andrew Zisserman	Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition, ICLR, 2015	Winner of ILSVRC 2014
C. Szegedy et al. Google Research	Going Deeper with Convolutions, CVPR 2015	GoogLeNet
K. He et al. Microsoft Research	Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition, CVPR 2016	CVPR 2016 best paper and winner of ILSVRC 2015, aka ResNet
DL for Image Annotations
A. Karpathy Li Fei-Fei	Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions, CVPR 2015
Justin Johnson Andrej Karpathy Li Fei-Fei	DenseCap: Fully Convolutional Localization Networks for Dense Captio, CVPR 2016
DL for Video Applications (CVPR 2016)
Ting Yao et al.	Highlight Detection with Pairwise Deep Ranking for First-Person Video Summarization [pdf]
Michael Cgyli et al.	Video2GIF: Automatic Generation of Animated GIFs from Video [pdf]
B. Tekin et al.	Direct Prediction of 3D Body Poses from Motion Compensated Sequences [pdf]
Bingbing Li. et al.	Progressively Parsing Interactional Objects for Fine Grained Action Detection [pdf]
Pingbo Pan et al.	Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Encoder for Video Representation With Application to Captioning [pdf]
Zheng Shou, Dongang Wang, Shih-Fu Chang	Temporal Action Localization in Untrimmed Videos via Multi-stage CNNs [pdf]
Ziwei Liu et al.	DeepFashion: Powering Robust Clothes Recognition and Retrieval With Rich Annotations [pdf]
Xiaofan Zhang et al.	Embedding Label Structures for Fine-Grained Feature Representation [pdf]
Other Video Applications (CVPR 2016)
Jingjing Meng et al.	From Keyframes to Key Objects: Video Summarization by Representative Object Proposal Selection [pdf]
K.  Grauman et al.	Summary Transfer: Exemplar-based Subset Selection for Video Summarization [pdf]
Feng Zhou, Yuanqing Lin	Fine-Grained Image Classification by Exploring Bipartite-Graph Labels [pdf]