Poster Session!

We all had to make a poster about our project. Most of the people who came were from our various labs, but there were also people who stopped by to check it out. And there was free food, so that helps

Last weekend I worked on finishing up my games. Midweek I asked Dr. Rosen (my advisor) if he could take a look and give me some feedback while I still had time to make changes. Last Friday he came in and went through all the games and gave me mostly minor suggestions and changes. There was only one game I had to do a lot of work on.

When we had finished he inquired about my plans after graduation. I told him I wasn’t sure but that if I applied for graduate school UCSC would probably be one of them. His response was “and we will definitely accept you,” which was surprising from someone who doesn’t say a whole lot. But I was very appreciative of his approval and when I asked he said he would be happy to write a letter of recommendation for me.

He wanted to come back on monday to spend more time playing the games. I had some work to do, so friday afternoon and monday morning I was pretty busy and a little stressed trying to pull together all the loose ends. Miraculously I got it to the place I wanted it to be, and he was pleased with everything. I spent that afternoon talking to Jay (an undergrad who has worked on this project in the past and will continue to work on it this semester). I explained to him how he had organized my code and answering any questions.

Tuesday I worked on my final report and added more comments to my code. Wednesday I spent creating a executable of the application, which allows it to be loaded onto any computer running microsoft robotics studio. This took a little more time then I would have expected (partly b/c I screwed something up midday and my code was temporarily nonfunctional), but I did eventaully get it working and was able to run the simulation on another computer!

So I spent the last few days developing a GUI (in this case a “form” window with buttons and information and text boxes). When the program loads you’re given a set of games to choose from and once a game is selected the window presents the appropriate options and begins running the game. It’s not all that attractive at the present time but it would be easy enough for someone else to improve if they wanted.

I have to admit, I’m rather proud of how my code is organized. (Ignore the rest of this paragraph if you’re not interested). I made an abstract Game class that has quite a bit of functionality in itself and which each of the other games (there’s currently 6) implement. Each game creates its own UserController (a set of controls without the window), which is loaded into the main window and replaced when the next game comes along. I also commented extensively and created a template class for making new games.

In addition to work, this week we also had to make posters. We have a poster session the last week where people can come and see what we’ve done and ask questions and the like. I’m quite happy with mine. Since I’m doing an exoskeleton project I included a picture of Iron Man. I’m not sure it’s completely appropriate (Iron Man was about weaponry and human enhancement while the arm I’m working with is for rehabilitation), but I did it anyway. Below is a picture of my draft, when I’m done I’ll find somewhere to put it that you can see the whole thing.

I realized today that this is my first full time job. The two day care centers I’ve worked at, Apple retail and the web team at school were all part time jobs. I think this is going to take some getting used to. Although we can sort of set our own schedules, we are of course expected to work about 8 hours every day. I’m not used to being in one place for that long. At school (even when I had eight hour days in high school) I’m always going from one place to another, one subject to another.

Today I woke up kind of sleepy to begin with. Then we had another presentation (the faculty mentors are each talking about their work). The other two were definitely interesting but today I could barely keep my eyes open. He wasn’t a terrible presenter, but he wasn’t great either. And since he works mostly with bioengineering, his topic was mostly about microbiology that I really didn’t understand. I didn’t really understand the purpose of his work to begin with, so I found it difficult to fabricate an interest in what he was explaining.

So after he went 10 minutes over on his talk and I could finally move and wake up a little bit, I went back to the lab and over the next few hours read three full papers and a handful of abstracts about exoskeletons and rehabilitation. They were pretty interesting papers but they also put me back to sleep. I still have one more to read.

Ben and I (the other guy working on the virtual reality stuff) finally talked to the guy who knows about it. He gave us a little demo and showed us how to access and run the code (we couldn’t even get there on our own yesterday). He’s only an undergrad and didn’t seem to understand it completely, but at least he got us started.

There are four of us working under the same advisor and three of us working in some form on the exoskeleton, so the three of us at least see each other pretty much all day. And we’ll probably go to lunch together just about every day. They’re nice guys and all, but it’s funny because we’re all kind of quite introverts, so it’s not exactly a talkative group. It’s pretty funny, hopefully once we get going on projects and get to know each other we’ll have more to talk about.

And on a final note, the food here is just killing me. It’s not that great to begin with (I’d have to say Stetson is at least a little better), and because it’s summer they aren’t serving as much food. They have like two areas to choose from and generally just one acceptable meat option. The rediculous thing is that they charge $13 for dinner if you pay in cash. I understand its all you can eat but for the amount and quality of food thats just unacceptable; I only occasionally pay $13+ for a meal and only good food. I’m not one to eat out much but I plan to do so on every possible occasion. Fortunately there are more and better places open for lunch.

Day was the first day of the “program”. We talked logistics for a bit and then took a tour around campus, or part of the campus anyway. We walked down to the bookstore and back; I was happy to learn there is a Bank of America ATM on campus and I even deposited my first check. We also checked out the bookstore, which is far more than a bookstore. They sell electronics (including apple computers) in addition to books and all the standard paraphernalia.

After that we had a bbq attended by our faculty mentors and some other people in the department. I am working under Dr. Jacob Rosen as well as three other students in the program. One is an electrial engineer and the other three of us are computer scientists. Dr. Rosen showed us around his lab and told us about the different project options.

The first one is an already functional robotic exoskeleton (arms only) with 7 degrees of freedom. The project involves creating a virtual environment that interacts with the exoskelton to create “games” which would help rehabilitate stroke patients. The base for the environment and the interaction with the arms has already been set up, the project would be to build environments for new games to be played. Examples he gave us were playing squash and painting an object in the virtual environment. The programming would be written in C# using the microsoft robotics studio.

The second project involves a robotic arm used for dental work. He wants to create a robot that can more exactly do certain dental procedures more accurately than a human. The specific project involves milling (I think that’s what he said but I don’t really know what milling is). Programming the arm itself is written in a very high level language (the higher level a language is the more natural and easily understood it is, lower level languages are more cryptic). Given two points in space it knows how to move from point A to point B without any further instruction and is designed to do very specific and usually repetitive tasks. But milling is not a simple a to b motion and must be carefully planned according to the specific situation.

The third project will eventually be related to a lower body exoskelton and involves studying human body motion. They have the same sort of suit used for animation to track motion. This project seems the least interesting to me because it is mostly data collection and there does not seem to be much programming involved.

I would really like to work on the virtual reality project. Unfortunately, so do the three other computer science students. He said there was enough work for all three of us to do one of the “games” but that he would rather have us working on different things.

Dr. Rosen is an interesting guy. He’s extremely soft spoken and doesn’t seem to be the most personable guy. I’m hoping once we get to know him a little better he’ll be easier to talk to.  We probably won’t be working directly with him but rather working with the graduate students under him and meeting with Dr. Rosen occasionally.

After that meeting we had the rest of the day free. One of my roommates (meaning she lives in the same apartment) is actually a student here and has a car, so she took us downtown to the grocery store and then we got some stuff from her apartment. A while later we went on a walk around campus and ended up at the dining hall for dinner. I am definitely not in shape for all these hills! I am going to try to go on regular long walks whenever possible. There’s certainly lots of paths and trails to explore.

I meant to at least get a picture of where I am today, but it didn’t happen and now its too dark. Tomorrow then!

Tomorrow we still don’t really start work. There’s a presentation and then tour of downtown Santa Cruz, and we pretty much have the rest of the day off again. I could get used to this, but wednesday we start work for real. It sounds like schedules are pretty laid back, we’re expected to work about 40 hours a week and get everything done but other then planned meetings with people we can come and go as we please. I’ll definitely try to get in and out earlier rather than later so I have time to do stuff if I want.

I can already see that my two months in Santa Cruz is going to be an interesting and very different experience for me.

My flight arrived at 12:00 this afternoon and pickup was at 2:00. I had communicated with the others being picked up and we all met up and had some time to get to know each other before pickup. We were transported by a shuttle service; the ride from San Jose to Santa Cruz was far more interesting then I would have ever expected.

Our driver is a Santa Cruz native going back 60 years or so. On our car ride I learned a good bit of information, some of it useful. I learned that while San Fransisco has the largest percentage of gay population, Santa Cruz has the largest percentage lesbian population. Additionally, Santa Cruz has the highest cost of living of any US city as it compares to the money that can be made working in the city (of course living costs are so high because many of the people who live here work in Silicon Valley).  We were warned about street beggars and told to not give them money in any circumstance. He also told us that Santa Cruz is very inventive in their methods of transportation and that any number of moving vehicles can be found roaming the city.

There’s a ton of national and state parks and apparently it’s a great place to go mountain biking and hiking. I’m hoping to check out some of the hiking paths. The weather is just perfect, especially for walking or any kind of outside excursion.

Our driver brought us to College Nine and the building we were supposed to check in. We were at the right place but it took us a minute to find the room with people in it. Once we got our keys we had to walk up hill past a few apartment buildings to get to our building. This would have been fine except I was carrying a 50 lb. suitcase and two other bags. I also didn’t realize there was an elevator in the apartment building until after I’d carried my bag upstairs (at least I’m only on the second level).

The apartments are very nice. The kitchen is quite spacious and has a large amount of storage space — to bad I don’t have anything to use in the kitchen. The room feels the same way, I need some more stuff to fill up the shelve and drawer. Everyone in my apartment and most of the building are in the same program and I am surprised by the portion of girls, at least a third.

Santa Cruz is probably the strangest campus I’ve ever been on. It’s not only large but very spread out, and all the in between areas are covered in trees. The apartment complex is quite literally in a forrest, as is the rest of the campus from what I can tell. Even in large campuses I’m accostumed to looking out and seeing the distant buildings.

It felt a bit like we’d been dropped off in the middle of no where. In addition to being surrounded by forrest, we were told nothing was open on campus and we haven’t seen any other students around. I heard classes start this week, so hopefully it will be a little busier.

With little better to do and no where to go, we all ended up just hanging out in one of the apartments. Since none of us really wanted to attempt to take the bus to downtown, we ended up ordering a pizza and eating that here. Tomorrow we should get meal cards and food venues should actually be open.

So far everyone seems really nice and it should be a good couple months. Tomorrow we meet everyone else and will actually get to see more of the campus and get a better feel for what we’ll be doing.