James Thigpen

Shey tagged me with a meme asking “What do you do?” (in the context of job-ness).

It’s always kind of irked me that my friends in the corporate world don’t seem capable of telling me what they do. A typical inquiry goes something like this:

James: So, what do you do?
Corporate Friend: I create solutions for synergistic metaproblems.
James: … So, what do you do?

I usually give up before I actually learn anything.

So here is my attempt to tell you what I do, and hopefully at the end you’ll actually know what I do.

I work as a research assistant at the University of Houston, in the Computer Science department, in the Quantitative Imaging Lab. The lab belongs to Dr. Shishir Shah. We are a research lab which focuses on quantitative imaging, oftentimes in the biomedical domain. Quantitative imaging is the name given to imaging techniques which extract quantitative (real world) data from an image. E.g., measuring a cell’s exact diameter from an image, measuring a particles absorption, or measuring the height of a person from an image. We like to measure.

I have several project going on currently. My primary research topic is Vision Beyond Sight: Diagnosis and Classification of Thyroid Cancer Using Spectral Imagery. In collaboration with The Methodist Hospital, we are trying to create new automated methods for diagnosing and grading thyroid cancer using spectral imaging methods. Spectral imaging enables the capture of spectral information at every point in the imaging plane. Instead of capturing a single RGB triplet at each point as we would in a color image, we sample the entire visible spectrum (400nm - 700nm). Anyway, our efforts involve capturing spectral image data from thyroid biopsy slides and attempting to classify the slides according to their known diagnosis.

A secondary project I have is LMAL, the Light Microscopy Automation Library. It is an open source (albeit currently unreleased) library for microscope automation written in java. It abstracts out all the components of a common upright light microscope and allows computer control of the entire system from a standard API.

I am also responsible for some administrivia in the lab.

So what kind of tools do I use? We’re mostly a java shop. I use eclipse for java development. My favorite plugins are Subclipse and JAutodoc. I also use TortoiseSVN extensively. We have several SVN repositories, including one for publications and presentations. We use Trac for project wiki’s. I use Visual Studio 6/2003/2005 mainly for JNI when dealing with native drivers for microscope hardware. There are several newish java projects that may let me get away from JNI programming (Yay!).

So there. Do you know what I do now? I hope so.