Week 1: July 5 - 9

Work

The Paul G. Allen Center

Tuesday was our first official day at work. Tejinder and I walked to our building and met Lorraine, who gave us useful stuff like keys to the building and our office and a July bus pass. Our office is a grad student office, but the other grad students seem to be out for the summer, so it's mostly just Tejinder and I in the room.

We also met for a little bit with our mentor, Dr. Shapiro, who, unfortunately, was sick. She explained to us two potential projects we could work on, and gave us some papers to read about both of them so we could decide which one we would prefer to work on.

Both were biomedical informatics projects; a description of the project we ended up choosing is on the research project page. The other project concerned multimedia information retrieval for biological research. According to the proposal Dr. Shapiro gave us, "The goal of this research is to develop a unified methodology for organization and retrieval of biological data from scientific experiments". Queries would be able to handle multiple related data types such as CT and MRI scans or neural firing patterns. Dr. Shapiro was just finishing writing this proposal, and we went for the other project because people were already working on it and it seemed to be defined better, and thus it would be easier to make a short summer project from part of it.

When we chose our project, we were given more detailed reading to do, and the rest of the week was spent reading and working on this webpage. I also spent a little bit of time figuring out how the UW servers are organized so that I know how to access my files from off-campus and Dr. Shapiro's shared files as well. To do this, I used the UW CSE Support web pages.

Play

Fremont Outdoor Movies

I had a pretty busy and fun weekend. On Saturday night I went to the Fremont outdoor movies with some friends to watch "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". It was great, hilarious as always ("What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" :))

Sunday was a typical Seattle day (overcast and rainy), but a friend and I braved the weather and did some touristy things in downtown Seattle, mostly by the waterfront.