/essays

My collection of essays exploring software development and philosophical inquiry

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Essays

My collection of essays exploring software development and philosophical inquiry.

Contents

[2024] This essay explores the impact of Pyrrhonian skepticism on René Descartes' philosophical work, particularly focusing on his famous proposition "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). It examines whether Descartes' certainty of the thinking subject successfully overcame the challenges posed by Pyrrhonian skepticism. The work delves into the historical context of skepticism, its main principles as outlined in Sextus Empiricus' "Outlines of Pyrrhonism," and how these ideas became a significant philosophical hurdle for those seeking absolute truths. Through this analysis, the essay contributes to our understanding of epistemology, the nature of knowledge, and the foundations of modern philosophy.

[2023] In this article, we explore the transformative concept of 'extensions' in TypeScript, a powerful tool inspired by Swift that redefines how we structure and develop programs. It blends technical details with philosophical insights, encouraging a reevaluation of our programming practices.

[2017] Object detection has become one of the most active research areas in computer vision. Even so, it continues to be an open research topic. The hardest problem in this field is image variation: each object in the world casts infinite images to the viewer, depending on its pose, position, surrounding light conditions, and background. However, it has been shown that when there is enough training data available, even simple statistical models can address computer vision problems with outstanding results. The required data for real-world scenarios tends to be hard to obtain in large quantities; usually between 50k and 100k images are needed. This thesis addresses the problem of the availability of large enough data sets by exploring synthetic data generation tools. These datasets are then used to train a state-of-the-art object detector, Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD), achieving 83.9% accuracy (mAP) on a dataset of 284 real-world images. The results obtained in this project hold potential for improving other areas of computer vision, such as video surveillance, medical imaging, autonomous driving, augmented reality, and robotics, as well as advancing the current state of computer vision in general.

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Contributing

While this is a personal collection, I welcome discussions. Feel free to open an issue for comments or questions about any essay.