Eelke Spaak

Hello everyone,

It’s been a huge while since I last post something here, and the reason is that it has just not been much of a priority. However, I now have something to announce: Google Image Slideshow! It is a tool that allows for very simple generation of a slideshow, based on Google Images search results. It is still under development, so things might (and will) change in the near future.

Also in the near future: I will be changing this personal website of mine, to reflect what I currently do (PhD candidate in Neuroscience) and other things.

Update: the version available from this page is now v2.1, and includes debugging info messages (can be turned on in Settings).

By popular request, I have made a new version of my Windows Sidebar Gadget for Google Calendar. The following (requested) features are included in this new version:

• Multiple calendar support!
• Option for using Google Calendar’s color info for coloring the calendar items
• Option for using 12-hour (am/pm) time format, instead of 24-hour (though why anyone would NOT want to use 24-hour format is a mystery to me… oh well :) )
• Slight adjustment of the background image that makes the gadget align a bit better with the sidebar

Download the gadget here.

Setting up the multiple calendar support is fairly straight-forward, just go to the gadget’s settings form, enter your credentials, and click the ‘retrieve’ link. The list below that link will now show the calendars associated with your account, and you can select the ones you would like to show up in the gadget.

For historical reasons, I should provide a link to the original version.

Let me know what you think!

N.B.: version 2.0 of this gadget is now available!

I had spent some time searching for a good Windows Vista sidebar gadget that displayed a few upcoming Google Calendar events, when I noticed somewhere that, in fact, sidebar gadgets are actually just HTML/CSS/JavaScript snippets. Because I could not find any really good gadget that did what I wanted, I decided to write my own. I hereby proudly present: The Calendar v1.0 .

It will display the first six upcoming Google Calendar events, along with their start and end dates and times, displaying the latter whenever this is appropriate. Each event’s title provides a link to the appropriate Google Calendar event detail page. When you hover your mouse over the gadget, a small calendar icon will appear in the bottom right corner of the gadget. Clicking it will bring up Google Calendar in your default browser.

Before the first use, you must enter your @gmail.com address and password and a desired update interval in the gadget’s settings form.

Below are some screenshots.

The last screenshot shows two hovering functions. First, when hovering over the title of an event, its full title is shown in a tooltip. Second, when hovering anywhere over the gadget, a calendar icon is shown that links to Google Calendar. Note that Windows for some reason does not include the cursor in screenshots, so that is why there is no ‘hand’ shown in the picture.

Let me know what you think! Of course, it is free software and open source, so distribute it as you like, as long as you give me (Eelke Spaak) the credit of developing it and always provide a link to my website. Since .gadget files are actually ZIP archives, you can just extract it with WinZip or whatever to obtain the source scripts.

N.B.: version 2.0 of this gadget is now available!

Some time ago already, I submitted an 8-page paper describing the research I conducted for my B.Sc. thesis to the Belgium-Netherlands Artificial Intelligence Conference 2008. You can download the submitted paper in PDF-format from my website.

Now let’s hope it gets accepted!

While programming simple Java swing applications, I often found myself writing a combination of a JTextField and a JButton (”Browse…”) when prompting the user to select a file. The JButton would then bring up a JFileChooser and the path to the selected file would show up in the text field. To make this easier, I have written a simple JFileField class that encapsulates the browse functionality. Its source (JFileField.java) and Javadoc (JFileField.html) are available.

Note that the component was originally created in the NetBeans IDE 6.0, so some remnants of the NetBeans form editor are still present in the Java source. This does not matter, however, since NetBeans generates highly portable code.

In March, I finished writing the thesis required for my degree of Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence. Woohoo! It is titled ‘From Imitation to Action Understanding: On the Evolution of Mirror Neurons’ and its abstract reads as follows:

The mirror neuron system (MNS) has been described as the neural basis of action understanding, as the system responsible for the human capacity to imitate and as the crucial step in the evolutionary development that led to language. Understanding the evolutionary origins of the MNS will therefore likely provide much insight into what makes us human. The involvement of the MNS in both imitation and action understanding has been firmly established. Various authors have discussed the evolutionary origins of the MNS and claimed that its function in facilitating imitation builds upon its role in action understanding and is thus a phylogenetically later development. I argue, however, that this hypothesis lacks sufficient theoretical or empirical evidence and instead present support for the reverse: the phylogenetically primary function of the MNS is imitation and the MNS evolved in direct response to a selective pressure for imitative behavior. This hypothesis was tested using evolutionary robotics simulation techniques. The simulation was conducted with embodied and simulated-world embedded artificial agents equipped with a lifetime-adapting (i.e., Hebbian learning) neural network for which the learning parameters were subject to evolution. The agents had to perform an imitation task. Analysis of the neural controller that evolved in response to this task revealed artificial neurons showing clear mirror characteristics, suggesting that, indeed, mirror neurons evolve due to a selective pressure for imitative behavior.

For those interested, the entire thesis (PDF, 3 MB) and its nice cover (PDF, 907 KB) are downloadable from this website.

My new website is online! It is mainly intended as a place where I can publish things I believe someone might find useful, such as Java code, or that I simply want to share with the world, such as papers I have written in the course of my university education.

I might decide to update this website regularly and actually use it as a weblog, but, knowing myself, I do not think I will :) .