Weekly Journals

Summer 2005 DMP Research

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This page displays my weekly journal while participating in the Distributed Mentor Project (DMP) at Texas A&M University. For quick navigation please click on the links above!

Week 1: May 30th to June 4th

On my arrival we had a BBQ dinner at the courtyard after check-in. I used this as an opportunity to make new friends. A group of us went to the Gym to workout and tour the campus since this campus is about three time bigger than most of our campuses.

On Tuesday we had an official breakfast meeting where we met our mentors. I spent most of the day taking care of logistics (setting up computer accounts, TAMU Id, keys etc.) On Wednesday, I attended the DMP seminar where I met other students participating in different programs like REU, USRG etc. I also had the opportunity to meet our student mentors. They are awesome people.

We also had Dr.Amato's group meeting, where Ms. Thomas gave a talk on Protein Folding Research and their success. It was interesting to know that their new approach is far better than the approaches used by different researchers in decades ago.

I also had a meeting with my PHD student mentor Sam; on what my project is all about and the necessary material I will need to accomplish my goals. We also discussed the Motion Planning paper: "A Journey of Robots, Molecules, Digital Actors, and Other Artifacts". It gave me a clear understanding on how motion planning plays an important role in my flocking behaviors research project.

As far as the project goes, I have been studying the shepherding behaviors, Parasol flocking system reference manual and Motion Panning papers. Also I'm studying python programming and HTML languages from scratch because they are the key languages I will be using in my research. We also had a free pizza dinner on Friday night and it was awesome.

Week 2: June 6th to June 10th

I'm still studying and playing with the python code to enable me get the understanding of the existing codes I will need to modify. I was able to fulfill the goals on reading the first two sections of the "Gross Motion Planning-A survey" before my meeting with Sam (my mentor). I also completed the overview of "Field D*: An Interpolation-based Path Planner and Re-planner" before Dr.Amato's group meeting, in the meeting they analyzed the paper and rated it. We also had a lecture on "Framework for Adaptive Algorithm Selection" at the meeting. It was interesting to know more about parallel STAPL and its efficiency

I also participated in the GRE practice exams; it was a good thing because it gave me the general overview on GRE exams. We had the "brown bag lunch" with Dr. Amato and a panel of her PHD graduate students. It was interesting to know more about graduate school and the diverse area a computer science student can fit-in. This meeting also gave me more confidence on my participation as undergraduate researcher. This is because it's one of the things that can make me very competitive to others during admission to graduate school. I will be so happy if I get the chance to participate in another research next summer

I have also completed the first project on "Following behaviors". In this project my goal was to modify an exiting flocking behavior code in such a way that the agents can follow in a circle.

Not only am I doing research but I also had the opportunity to join the water aerobic team to learn more about water aerobics training this week. It's fun to participate in such a program.

In addition to this completed project, I want to modify the code again to get a new behavior whereby the predators will be attacking the prey in a circular loop, without harming them. The main mission of the agents is to prevent the preys from getting out of the loop. My reading assignment for the week ahead is Composable Group Behavior.

Week 3: June 13th to June 17th

This week on my research project, I was focusing more on coding and analyzing existing behaviors. It was interesting to know that most of the existing behaviors were having minor errors in their function calls. I was excited in correcting those errors because it gave me detailed understanding on the python pattern of coding and also gave me more confidence that I can do this whole project. As of now, I'm proud to say that with the help of John and Sam (my mentors), I have been able to correct all the existing behaviors errors. My task for next week is to analyze the codes one-step deeper.

Some other activities that I participated in as part of our summer program were:

  • USRG Seminar: - This seminar talked about Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Their main idea of this research is to figure out the best way to reduce the usage of petroleum products other than natural oil in the USA. They proposed that using hybrid automobiles would be one way to reduce the gas usage in the USA. It was clear that an average US worker travels from the suburb of the city to work everyday. This seminar interested me because I'm just imagining how one will be able to beat traffic when going to work or school. If this research is able to come to a perfect completion and accepted by automobile manufactures, and the government, I believe it will increase productivity and reduce the cost of gas for an average American.

  • Meeting with Prof. Nancy: - I had a meeting with Prof. Nancy Amato and my two graduate mentors (John and Sam). The purpose of this meeting was to know my achievements and my goals for the week ahead. That meeting also gave me more details on what we intend to achieve in this research. She also suggested that I should work more closely with John so that we can achieve our goal faster. She believes completing the entire research will be a stepping-stone for reaching the game industries and many more. It is also our goal to make a publication by August.

  • Meeting on Motion Planning: - This meeting was a discussion on the final section of the "Gross Motion Planning" paper with the motion planning group and my group. Our discussion was more focused on search paths and potential fields. It gave me more idea why my mentor always says you cannot do anything on your project without an in-depth idea in motion planning.

  • Meeting on Web page design: - This meeting with Lydia was to give us the detail requirements on what DMP coordinators expect to see on our web page's. It was disclosed that if the web pages does not meet these requirements, or one has no web page at all his/her stipend would be withheld. But praise the name of God that I had already started my own and it was on the right track.

  • Weekly Brown-Bag Lunch: - This week lunch was so exciting because we had three different lectures from Texas A&M to give us some detail on their individual research.

    • One professor Dr. Lui, gave a broad but interesting talk on cyber security research and education. The purpose of this research is to generate an algorithm that creates large scale of auditing systems and at the same time determine privacy, authentication and others without invading user's privacy.

    • Dr. Chu also talked about Robotic research from DARPA grand challenge 2005. This robot is to run 25mph on 1500 miles. It was so interesting how the whole simulation was presented.

    • PhD Student Andrew Kerne also gave a short talk on his project called "Combine Formation: - Mixed-Initiative Composed of image and Text surrogates" It was amazing how one can collect information using their software. This software purpose is to allow user to have more choice when searching for an item on the net. One is able to drag and drop the any item of interest into an information page and store all of them as one group of collection. By user using this software, it reduces junk list and other unwanted information as compare to other search engine. It also provides images and URL information to all the related pages.

  • Meeting on Motion Planning: - This meeting was a discussion on the paper "Probabilistic Roadmaps for Path Planning in High Dimensional Configuration Space". We discussed about a new motion planning method for robots in static workspace using two methods (i.e. a learning phase and a query phase). Its exciting for me because everyday I learn new things in motion planning. I hope to get a research relating to this by next summer.

Week 4: June 20th to June 24th

This week on my research project, I was focusing more on coding and analyzing existing behaviors into more detail to understand each line of code. I'm also supposed to come up with simple documentation of a list of existing behaviors, their attributes and what they are doing. In addition, I'm to do more criticism on each behavior on whether, they are doing what they were programmed to do, make suggestions and give a list of basic behaviors I need to generate in addition to the existing ones. Unfortunately, these codes have no lines of comments that can help me to understand them easily, for this reason, its taking me more time than I've estimated.

Some other activities that I participated in as part of our summer program were:

  • Immersive Visualization Center Tour at the Texas A &M University, Geosciences department. This was an interesting tour because I got to know what this department is all about and their contribution to the individual researchers in TAMU. One of the main purposes of this department is to handle immense data for researchers. They have one big screen of about 24ft wide and 8ft tall. This can handle any animation or presentation in a very wide scope that helps viewers to see what is going on more clearly. This screen is wider than any screen I've seen in Movie Theaters. It was also interesting to know that even if someone walks in front of the screen the data does not get all over his/her face/body as normal projectile presentation does.

  • Meeting with Motion Planning Group- We discussed the "OBPRM for 3D Workspaces" and the "Rapidly exploring random trees: A new tool for path planning" papers. As I'm aware the Amato group main research goal is on motion planning. This is because all other individual on-going researches here depend greatly on that. For this reason it's our routine to meet at least twice a week to discuss different papers and come up with new ideas that can help this research. Its one of the times I like so much because I found myself among graduate students who will be throwing questions to you from all angles. It's so interesting because I always learn something new.

  • Meeting with my graduate Mentors - We had discussion on our over all goal we want to achieve by the end of this summer. We were able to come to a common conclusion that will help us to get a better simulation on our project.

  • USRG Seminar - The topic was "GRE Prep - Strategy Session". We were expose to more techniques and tricky ways of answering questions on GRE exams. We were also given the new edition of Princeton Publication book called "Crashing GRE". This was a great motivation to me because I know after going through the book with him I will do better than my first GRE practice exam.

  • Campus REU Brown Bag Lunch - The topic was "Tips for Graduate School" by Rhonda Collins, Office of Graduate Studies and Preston Dubose, Office of Distance Education. We were address on the importance of graduate school both on-campus and distance education. These kinds of seminars is helping me to expand my horizon on what graduate school I will like to go. I was also blessed because I won an award for picking the lucky number when we were ask to pick a number between 1 and 100.

  • Brown Bag Lunch - The topic was "Presenting Research Results" by Dr. Frank Shipman. He gave us the necessary guideline we will need to write our final report and poster presentation. This talk has given me some ideas and suggestions to start thinking about my abstracts and final papers.

  • Cookie Break - I've always loved this time on our calendar because its more fun interacting with other students whiles enjoying better cookies. It also helps me to reflect on what I've done so far in my research work and alerts me to speed up because it marks the end of another week.

Week 5: June 26th to July 1st

On my research project this week, I was focusing more on coding and analyzing existing behaviors into more detail to understand each line of code. So far it's encouraging because I'm getting it gradually. I've started my documentation on existing behaviors. I hope to complete it by next week. I also spent most of my time trying to come up with a good presentation that is due on June 30, 2005 during our meeting with Dr. Amato and her research team. I also wrote a draft of my non-technical abstract paper.

Some other activities that I participated in as part of our summer program were:

  • Meeting with Motion Planning Group- We discussed a paper on "A General Framework for Sampling on the Medial Axis of the Free Space". Our focus was to analyze and criticize this paper as well as to understand the basic framework. I think the analysis and criticism was one of the most interesting I have witnessed in our meetings.

  • USRG Seminar - Topic: GRE Prep by Joe Williamson - Verbal I. We went through the part one on the verbal section of our practice book "Cracking the GRE". It is nice participating in this seminar because it's preparing me for the big task ahead.

  • Campus REU Brown Bag Lunch - Topic: Writing an Abstract (Technical Writing) by Elizabeth Tebeaux, Director of the Office of Distance Education. This talk was very beneficial and interesting because of the fact that the outline discussed is the one I will need for my technical abstract paper. Also it's a great idea to know this stuff, because its helps to write better paper for publication.

  • Brown Bag Lunch - Topic: Graduate Admissions Panel. This was one of the meetings I've been waiting for. It was a chance to talk to our graduate admissions panel to get more information on the admissions process, how one should prepare among other things. We also had the chance to ask LOTS of questions. Progressively, I am getting enlightened about which graduate school I will attend.

  • Meeting with Amato group - This meeting was basically on giving presentation on our progress on our individual projects. We are four undergraduate computer science students in the Parasol lab; we all had the chance to present our work. I was amazed about the way we were able to present our work because we were a little bit tensed not knowing the kind of questions one may throw at us.

  • Cookie Break - I've always loved this time on our calendar because its more fun interacting with other students whiles enjoying yummy cookies. It also helps me to reflect on what I've done so far in my research work and alerts me to speed up because it marks the end of another week.

Week 6: July 5th to July 8th

On my research project this week, I was focusing more on coding and analyzing existing behaviors into more detail to understand each line of code. So far it's encouraging because I'm getting it gradually. I've completed my documentation on existing behaviors. I also spent most of the time trying to update follow_in_circle behavior so that they can remain in the loop and not run away after sometime. To our surprise, it does not do what we wanted it to do by remaining in the loop even though our math calculation is right. We discovered that since the predator's velocities and force's keeps changing there is no way it can remain in the loop for long. It sounds a little bit disappointing but it has help me to understand more on what can be true in real world an that of the computer world.

Challenges: - One basic challenge I have encounter so far is with the python compiler on Linux. It just terminate the program when there are some errors, but it does not give the detail description of the errors as any other program compiler will do. It's a little bit frustrating because I need to read each line of code to figure out where the error is. If this fails then I have to email my program to John to run it on windows, printout the console before I can correct these errors.

My goal for next week is to study a behavior called search_least_visiting and see how I can incorporate that into my work.

Some other activities that I participated in are:

  • Meeting with Motion Planning Group- We discussed a paper on "Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model". Our focus was to analyze this paper by understanding the basic framework. I think it was a good discussion even though our group does not use their approach. Our discussion helps the understanding of the other group on what we are trying to do. I was also happy since this was the first time we've discussed a paper from my research area.

  • USRG Seminar - Topic: GRE Prep by Joe Williamson - Verbal II and Math. We went through the part two on the verbal section and almost the whole section of the math from our practice book "Cracking the GRE". It is nice participating in this seminar because it's preparing me for the big task ahead.

  • Campus REU Brown Bag Lunch - Topic: Purpose of Higher Education by Dr. K. R. Rajagopal, Professor from Engineering Department. This talk was very beneficial and interesting. He did explain who a student is, their role in going to higher education, which an instructor or a teacher is and his role in student life. He supported his points with a lot of quotations from John Ruskin, John Henry Cardinal Newman, James Joseph Sylvester, Jon Dewey and many others. I got to know I need to do more as a student than I'm doing right now in other the achieve the most in live.

  • Brown Bag Lunch - Topic: Graduate Admissions Panel. This was a continuation of the meeting we had last week. It was a chance to ask some question we did not ask last week. Our graduate student panel gave more information on the application process, and how one should prepare among other things. Progressively, I am getting enlightened about which graduate school I will like to attend but I'm not sure which research program I want to enroll into.

  • Meeting with Dr. Amato and her Research Team -: It is our weekly meeting where graduate students normally give presentation on their achievements. The purpose is to help the presenter prepare in a timely manner and also give suggestion to what they can include or delete from their presentation before given a talk at a big conference. This meeting is helpful to the presenter because everyone has a chance to ask questions and make criticism of their work. The presenter for this week was Dawen Xie a PhD student, his talk was on "Incremental Map Generation (IMG)". This is a new way to generate roadmap without using OBPRM or basic PRM. Base on his results I think the IMG will be more efficient than the basic PRM.

  • Cookie Break-: Today's Cookie break reminds me to know that we have four more weeks to the end of the program. I guess I need to spend time on my final report because I'm not very good in writing.

Week 7: July 11th to July 15th

This week on my research project, I was able to understand the behavior called search_least_visiting. I had great experience with the code. I was also able to develop a third behavior called runto_friends. This behavior is nice and interesting because the prey run towards their member flock mate when the predators are attacking them. I'm excited because it's doing what I want it to do. My goal for next week is to generate a new behavior called attack_in_group and also to put finishing touches to my abstract paper that is due on the 19th.

Some other activities that I participated in are:

Week 8: July 18th to July 22nd

This week on my research project, I created a new behavior called attack_in_group. This is one of the interesting behaviors I've created so far because there is no way a prey can escape from predators. I created this behavior to enhance the functionality of our existing attack_in_Line behavior. One main setback of the attack_in_Line was that, the predator normally loses focus when chasing a prey; the ratio for this was 1:1. But with this new functionality, multiple predators can attack a prey. I also finished my Abstract paper and submitted it on time. My goal for next week is to test performance of my result and also start drafting my final paper and poster presentation.

Some other activities that I participated in are:

Week 9: July 25th to July 29th

On my research this week, I focused more on hiding_behind_obstacle behavior. I tried to understand the overall simulation. There were some few errors, but I was able to correct them. It's working very well, but I need to include the drawing behavior to it, so that we can see the direction the prey and the predator are moving to. I was also able to draft my final paper and my poster presentation. Hopefully, I will have the final version by Tuesday.

Some other activities that I participated in are:

  • USRG Seminar- Topic: "Life after your BS degree & prospects after graduate school" by Dr. Halit Uster. He gave us more information on what to expect after our BS degree and the advantages of graduate school. We were encourage to enroll in PhD program so as to get more flexibility on our work schedule and more opportunities we may come across after graduating in PhD program.

  • Campus REU Brown Bag Lunch - Topic: "Social Connections to Professional Success" by Dr. Nancy Dickey. She gave a lecture on what it takes to make good connections with people and the importance of those connections. She also talked brief about the impact of networking with people you like and even those you think they don't like you.

  • Meeting with Composable Group - The purpose of our group meeting was to determine how to integrate the new game engine called "Torque" to our group behaviors in other to get more natural and better simulation. There were few pros and corns, but we hope to do the first integration in two weeks time. We also discussed about what we will like on our CGB poster.

  • Meeting with Dr. Amato group - One graduate student named Aimee had her MS defense. We were there to give her moral support for her good work done for the past three years. We were excited because she came out with flying colors. We also had a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Amato. The purpose of this meeting was for her to know our individual progress.

  • Brown Bag Lunch - Topic: "Faculty Research Panel". The members of this group were Dr. Riccardo Gutierrez, Dr. John Keyser and Dr. Scott Pike. All these professors gave a brief presentation on their research interests and their current research program. It was interesting and very beneficial because we were exposed to more research areas we can consider when applying to graduate school.

  • Cookie Break - Today's Cookie break was great. We eat yummy cookies and interacted with one another as usual.

Week 10: August 1st to August 5th & 8th

This week is my final week for this research so I'm putting finishing touches to all my work.

Some other activities that I participated in are: