week six
july 18 - july 22


Monday, July 18:

Sixth week! Can't believe it. This summer is flying by...
Today I started a glossary of artifacts, agents, and actions performed in the AO Chemo process. Hopefully, this will clarify my understanding of the process, and help everyone in LASER somewhat comprehend the medical terms used.

I've really got to find a laundromat....



Tuesday, July 19:

I finished up the glossary for the AO Chemo process, and forwarded it to Raunak, who will hopefully make sense of the mess of agents. I always think I have a good understanding of what's going on, but that's never really the case. I also did a lot of looking at graduate schools online.  Some sites posted links directly to a complete listing of Computer Science research labs to show what kind of work is being done. Those were the most helpful in showing me what the students were like because a lot of times there were profiles of each grad student in each lab. But research labs seemed to be a hidden secret for other schools. And some professors' websites had a not-so-friendly attitude towards grad school applicants. I have a solid list of schools to apply to, but it still needs to be narrowed down...




Wednesday, July 20:

I totally revamped this DMP website today. I had several complaints of the seafoam green: "Natalie, I'm going blind...I'm seeing spots...this is unbelievably ugly for a comp sci major"....etc.  Alright, fine! Hope this looks a little better. I'm not so used to this website stuff, ok? I also met with George Avrunin since Professor Clarke is out of town, and we just recapped the work I've been doing in the past week, as well as the graduate school application process.



Thursday, July 21:

Heather gave me a demo of FLAVERS today. It's a finite state verifier, so it makes sure certain conditions exist or are true in all situations. Very cool stuff. It even shows when conditions fail--what the values of the parameters are, where in the code it occurs...neato. In two weeks when Rachel comes back from vacation, she's going to give me a demo of PROPEL too. It's interesting to see the different projects within LASER. I'm mostly just gathering requirements from the Baystate Medical team to make a process, and maybe making some simplified code in LittleJIL to be used one day to implement a larger system, but the other grad students are working on different parts of this whole project.


Friday, July 22:


Big meeting at Baystate today, but in the morning, we had a quick Medical Safety meeting. Beth and George led the discussion of "well-documented medical safety problems", which I can hopefully take a look at. The meeting at Baystate went really well. I handed out copies of my work on the process, and the medical professionals agonized over what they actually do for this process. A very productive meeting, indeed! Afterward, we got a tour of the Chemo unit, starting in the Triage area, then going to where the Doctors write the treatment plans, then to the pharmacy, and finally to the Infusion Suite. I hope I remember everything that was important.