The Joy of Flex

The Buzzword team hasn’t officially joined the ranks of Adobe employees yet, but the folks in the Newton office were kind enough to invite us over to their Thanksgiving lunch today, and there were a few tech talks afterwards. I really enjoyed getting to hear Shai Avidan, who recently joined Adobe, give a talk about his research into seam carving. There wasn’t a great deal more raw material in his talk than what you can get from the image resizing video that’s been around a while, but it was absolutely thrilling to hear him in person, chat with him, get a sense of what might be coming next, and try to understand what he was thinking.

In particular, I noticed in his talk a real emphasis on how powerful the seam carving algorithm was at automatically finding the right seams to remove or insert, without any human intervention at all. It seemed to me that this was one of the things that got him excited. That’s the kind of thing that it’s hard to get any other way than in person.

In the photos, that’s me on the left and Shai on the right. As you have certainly guessed, the first one was the original picture and the second is with the middle carved out, using the excellent Rsizr tool.

I think I’m going to like working at Adobe.

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