Intelligence is like four-wheel drive. It only allows you to get stuck in more remote places. - Garrison Keillor (A Prarie Home Companion)


Graduate student in Computer Science @ UC Berkeley
Office:  545 Soda Hall, 510-642-9940
By Mail:  387 Soda Hall #1776, Berkeley, CA  94720-1776

Last updated June 5, 2007

(research interests | publications | teaching | extracurricular stuff | links | personal minutia)


research interests

I work with Jitendra Malik as a member of the Berkeley vision group.

My main interest is object recognition in 2D and 3D.  I worked on the extension of 2D shape contexts to 3D, and did an empirical study comparing their ability to distinguish similar objects in range data to that of spin images and a similar feature based on spherical harmonics (designed by Ravi Kolluri).

My current research focus is content-based image navigation, retrieval and object recognition of 2D images. In particular, I'm interested in learning the relative importance of features on a per-category or per-image basis to improve navigation and retrieval performance.

publications

Andrea Frome. "Learning Distance Functions for Exemplar-Based Object Recognition". Ph.D. thesis, August 2007. pdf

Andrea Frome, Yoram Singer, Fei Sha, Jitendra Malik. "Learning Globally-Consistent Local Distance Functions for Shape-Based Image Retrieval and Classification". ICCV 2007.
paper (pdf)  |  talk (pdf)  |  talk with animations (pdf)  | 
View the full results.

Andrea Frome, Yoram Singer, Jitendra Malik. "Image Retrieval and Recognition Using Local Distance Functions". Proceedings of Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2006. pdf
Accepted as a poster.

Andrea Frome, Jitendra Malik.  "Object Recognition using Locality Sensitive Hashing of Shape Contexts". Nearest-Neighbor Methods in Learning and Vision. Ed. Gregory Shakhnarovich, Trevor Darrell, and Piotr Indyk. MIT Press, 2006. pp. 221-247. (pdf | ps) (NOTE: formatting and page numbers do not match those in the book)

Andrea Frome, Daniel Huber, Ravi Kolluri, Thomas Bülow, and Jitendra Malik.  Recognizing Objects in Range Data Using Regional Point Descriptors.  Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Prague, Czech Republic, 2004.  (copyright Springer-Verlag)  (ps | pdf)


teaching

In Spring 2004 I TA'd CS188 under Stuart Russell.  I TA'd the discussion sections geared toward Cog Sci majors. You can see how my students rated me on HKN's web page.


extracurricular stuff

I like to sing. Open mic nights, karaoke, in traffic. In mid-May 2006, I joined a select group of professors, post-docs, and grad students to debut as Lady X and The Positive Eigenvalues at the 50th birthday party for Shankar Sastry. We even performed a song dedicated to Sastry to the tune of a Little Richard song with lyrics by Mike Jordan. Then we performed at the FOCS theory conference in Berkeley on October 22, and featured an original song written by Christos Papadimitriou. You can go here if you want to read one Berkeley theory student's take. We rounded out our 7-month Berkeley tour with a performance in the Woz Lounge in Soda Hall, ostensibly for the opening of the RAD Lab. For that performance, we were also joined by another CS professor, Dr. Armando Fox. There is some video evidence of that performance on Google video (though I don't dare post the link). Most recently, on March 12th, 2007, we played for the CS Visit Day crowd in the Woz Lounge of Soda Hall in the hopes that it will lure more cool grad students to our department.

I volunteer with the Prison University Project, a college program run at San Quentin Prison by Patten College.  Last semester (Spring 2006), I was on the team of TAs for Math 50A, a course that reviews basic math skills and prepares students for Algebra.  Read an article about the program here.

I enjoy rock climbing, and I'm a member at the Berkeley Ironworks gym. Currently I'm working on 5.11B climbs and still need to get around to taking my lead test.

I rode (and raced, kinda) for a couple seasons with the Cal Cycling team. The team is three-time National Champions in road racing (2002, 2003, and 2004), and one-time National Champions in cyclocross (2002) (I had no part in the victories).  Check out www.calcycling.org for info on the team and for some great training routes in the East Bay.

I also used to handle and sell the team's clothing.  Now to order Cal Cycling jerseys, shorts, socks, jackets, or whatever, send an e-mail to calcycling.clothing@gmail.com.  You do not need to be a team member to order clothing from the team, and all profits support the racing team.


links

threadless.com - I don't tend to wear a lot of t-shirts, but this site has me hooked. Designs are submitted, discussed, and voted on by the community, resulting in some pretty darn nifty t-shirts.
emusic.com - Where I download most of my music. All in un-DRM'd MP3 format, at 30 cents a track ($10/month subscription rate for 30 downloads). And they have a lot of great stuff (so long as you're willing to stray from the major labels).
NPR's Song of the Day - Where I often find out about new music. I like it so much, I podcast it to myself.
fuh2.com - Put up by my friend Scott and some coworkers of his, this site highlights the environmental and safety threats the new H2 poses, and encourages people to express their opinions of the vehicle, mostly in the form of hand gestures.
pandora.com - A cool streaming music site based on the Music Genome Project that can serve up a personalized radio station on-the-fly after you give it a song or artist in a genre you like.


personal minutia

"That's not ink, it's asphault." - I had a bike accident in March 2003 where I landed on my chin going at least 15 mph.  Luckily, nothing was broken, though I did scrape up my chin and chest pretty bad and needed 5 stitches (2 deep, 3 surface) in my chin.  I learned something fascinating: we all know that asphault can completely remove layers of skin, but I discovered that around the edge of the missing skin, it can leave an erie blue color.  After the scrapes on my chin were healed, I was surprised to discover blue streaks trapped under the skin and scar tissue, essentially a road tattoo.  At least once a week I have somone try to gently alert me that I have marked myself with a pen.

North Rim to South Rim, September 2006 - This fall I hiked the Grand Canyon from the north rim to south rim with my cousin, Brad Frome, and two of his friends. We took 5 days (two days down, one at the bottom, two days up). It was a fantastic trip, and I highly recommend it. You can see the pics from my trip by clicking here. (As a side note, these pictures got corrupted on my camera at the end of the trip. Most of the software I tried couldn't recover them, and I was finally able to almost fully recover them using PhotoRescue.)

26.2 miles, 4 hours 22 minutes - I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon in 1997.  I hope to run one again some day, maybe in under 4 hours.

12,000 ft - I once jumped out of a perfectly good plane. I plan to do it again. But don't tell my mother.

"Have you seen Fight Club?" - My ex-housemate, Kate Scott, has a women-run, handmade soap business. She used to make the soap in our kitchen, though soap production eventually moved out of the house. The soaps have a 100% vegetable oil base (no animal fats). I use the soaps myself and I love 'em, especially the Oatmeat Honey and French Green Clay. They are the only soaps I've found that I can use on my face without drying it out. Check out her site for The Soap Garden.