Sunday

I drove up to Boston from New Jersey Saturday night so that I could have my car with me, and my boyfriend Aaron came with me to help me move in. We intended to stop for the night and get a hotel somewhere, since my housing didn't technically open up until Sunday, but by the time I realized how close we were there were no more cheap hotels, so we just ended up driving all the way. My RA was extremely nice when I called at 2 am and asked if I could check in, so I filled out all the paperwork and moved my stuff in early Sunday morning before going to bed. It was also at this point that I found out about Boston University's totalitarian guest policy, but they worked with me as best they could and let Aaron stay with me, when technically I was supposed to have 48 hours prior approval and a male host. It wouldn't have been an issue at any other college, though. I wanted to cry when I saw where I'd be living, so I spent today scattering my stuff around and buying posters to cover the ugliness of the room.

Monday

Aaron needed to go home today, so we took the T to the Back Bay train station and he paid a ridiculous amount of money to get there in the same amount of time as driving takes. I arrived at Margrit's office around 12:30 pm, found that my fellow DMP participant Christen had not yet arrived, and then spent the rest of the day running around getting everything I needed. First, my BU ID card, which was all the way down at the other end of campus (almost a mile away), then back to the IT department which is right next door to the Computer Science department, where I set up my account and had to come up with a ridiculously long, complicated password which I have already forgotten. Once I had the campus-wide account I could go to the Computer Science lab, which is not in the Computer Science building, and have a Unix account set up, and then wait for it to activate before I could set up a NT account, and then wait for it to activate before I could ask for the research account which is really the only account that matters. I also had my BU ID card activated so that I could use it as a keycard to get into the lab where I'll be working. Since Christen hadn't shown up yet (her plane was late), Margrit gave me an overview of the research being done here and some papers to read. She also introduced me to a few people that I'll be working with this summer. After all of that, I went shopping and bought a nice tapestry to further cover my ugly walls and an egg crate mattress pad thingy to make my blue vinyl dorm mattress bearable. Christen had gotten in by this time and came over to say hi when she heard me stapling my tapestry to the wall between our rooms (which worked surprisingly well considering its plastered).

Tuesday

Today I mostly took Christen around and showed her how to do all of the stuff I'd done the day before while she was dealing with checking in to housing. We have unlimited graduate student accounts instead of regular undergraduate accounts. :) Margrit showed us some of the applications that have been developed here, like the Camera Mouse, and we spent some time playing with that. Since neither Christen or I have any background experience with Computer Vision, Margrit showed us where there was some code we could play with. Christen is more familiar with Windows, and I prefer Unix when I'm coding, so she looked at the Windows code and I looked at the Linux code. Neither of them made much sense, but I think I started to figure out what was going on. We then went home and read some of the papers that Margrit had given us.

Wednesday

Today we met with the entire Sensorium group. The meeting was pretty boring, because it was all talk of stuff that Christen and I had no frame of reference for and no valuable insight to offer. It was suggested during the meeting that a timing table which contained various run times of common Computer Vision algorithms was needed, and Margrit suggested that perhaps Christen and I could work on such a thing. I continued to look at the motion detection code I'd been given, and managed to change the display colors and add in more windows with different displays of the same video (for example, regular video, negative video, and motion display). Christen wasn't having any luck with her code, so I tried looking at it and couldn't find anything understandable in it either. In the code I was looking at, I could clearly see what was going on in the code (for example, when the display was being set up, when the image was being created, etc.), but all of the code she was going over looked exactly the same.

Thursday

Christen asked to meet with Margrit today because she was having problems with her code, and we both went and expressed our confusion about what we were supposed to be doing and our need for more guidance. It was decided that Christen should have a Linux machine set up for her, since development in Linux is much easier. We also met the guy who'd written the code I'd been modifying, Stephen Crampton. He spent a couple of hours with us going over Linux techniques, Computer Vision background, his Finger Counter program, and other useful information. The Finger Counter is pretty cool, but it has problems recognizing my hands because they're so small that my fingers aren't long enough to extend past the threshold that distinguishes between random bumps and real fingers. The lab Sysadmin started installing Linux on a computer for Christen, but the resolution is all messed up and the camera doesn't work yet because a patch needs to be installed.

Friday

Another graduate student, Nahur Fonseca, helped us to set up the OpenCV library today. It's mostly installed but doesn't work yet, so he'll come back next week to finish it up. We spent the rest of the day playing around with various Computer Vision programs that were available to us and making our webpages. When I got home, Aaron told me his grandfather, Pops, had died, so I drove 5 hours back to New Jersey to be with him and his family over the weekend.