Journal

Week 1 (June 4-11)     Week 2 (June 11-17)     Week 3 (June 18-24)     Week 4 (June 25-July1)

Week 5 (July 2-8)     Week 6 (July 9-15)     Week 7 (July 16-22)     Week 8 (July 23-29)

Week 9 (July 30 - Aug 5)

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Week 1 (June 4-10)

I arrived at the University of Minnesota on Saturday June 2nd after a 10 hour car ride.  I checked into the dorm on the 3rd and my parents headed back to Illnois.  My mentor had arranged for me to live with students in a psychology research program, and participate in their activities, so I'm not at all alone on campus!  Sarah Osentoski is the other girl participating in the dmp with me, and we are both mentored by the same professor.  We spent the first couple days figuring out how to get our computers hooked up to the ethernet so we could maintain these pages from our rooms!

The psychology students ate dinner together on the 3rd at a restaurant near campus.  That is one of the neat things about being at a big university - there are restaurants and convenience stores all over!  Sarah and I met Professor Gini on the 4th and we talked about some housekeeping things like ID cards and also discussed the projects we could work on, and toured the labs.  There are a lot of graduate students working with Prof. Gini that will help us whenever she isn't on campus.  I'll get to meet some of them Monday and Tuesday when there are meetings of the intelligent agents and robotics groups.

Thursday I met with my professor again and decided which project to work on.  I think that I will be helping finish the user interface for the intelligent agents project.  So I have a lot of reading to do!  There are several papers on the project I need to take a good look at, and also the program is written in Java so I need to learn the language. 

I had another fun activity with the psych program on Sunday: a picnic at a lake near the city! The weather was finally warm (it was in the low 60's until a couple days before!) and the lake was really beautiful. I like getting to do some fun activities along with the research. In fact I know there are already plans to see some plays and concerts and also visit some museums in the city.


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Week 2 (June 11-17)

I went to the meeting Monday of the intelligent agents group, and got a better idea of what I might be working on. This weekend will be devoted to learning more about Java and familiarizing myself with the group's existing program. Hopefully next week I will find out who I'll be working with and what my project will be!

Wednesday I went with the psych group to a play at one of the theaters in town. We also ate at a really good Greek restaurant! Minneapolis has a nice bus system with a lot of stops near my dorm, so my friends and I can get downtown or to Target when we need to!

On a more interesting note, apparently the State of Minnesota has gone bankrupt, and might have to shut down for a couple of weeks in July. This would mean that all state institutions (like the university I'm at) would be shut down too. The research would continue since its funding is not from the state, but the dorms and food service might close! My mentor has been meeting with other professors who have students here for the summer, to decide what to do with us if we can't live on campus for a while.


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Week 3 (June 18-24)

Monday I attended another MAGNET meeting, and Wednesday I met with John Collins, the group leader, and was assigned a project! Mostly I will be fixing bugs in the GUI interface for the testbed, and also adding some features. Right now I just need to figure out where all the user interface files are (its a HUGE program), learn the emacs text editor, and then start playing with the code to learn what it all does. I also need to learn more about Java Swing GUI. Its really interesting, Java does a great job of providing lots of tools to make good interfaces.

Tuesday evening I went canoeing with the EE/CE REU guys :-) It was great! The same guys also play ultimate frisbee every evening, so I have been joining in on that. Its so much fun, and a great way to get my mind of programming! After sitting in front of a computer all day I'm ready to move around some :-)


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Week 4 (June 25-July 1)

This week I'm continuing to read about Java GUIs and look at the MAGNET interface. So far I've been learning all about the basic components of interfaces and also familiarizing myself with the functions offered in the Java Swing library. Once I get the library functions down I can start figuring out the classes in the actual MAGNET interface.

Sarah and I are going to be giving talks on our projects to the EE/CE REU students. I will be talking in two weeks, and will probably mostly discuss MAGNET and e-commerce in general. MAGNET is very new and interesting research, and many of the students here may end up dealing with this kind of work in the future.


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Week 5 (July 1-8)

Happy 4th of July everyone! I had a great holiday. Went with Sarah (another girl here from the DMP program) to a lake where some friends of hers have a house. I met some of her friends and we all hung out outside and went swimming and took a really fun ride on a speedboat! There was a 4th of July boat parade that was neat to watch too. Sarah has captured a stuffed rabbit belonging to one of her friends and we photographed it in differend places, like under a car wheel and tied to a clothes line and falling off the deck *laugh*

I've also been introduced to a new and really cool comic strip called Sluggy Freelance. Its about a guy that owns a homicidal psycopath bunny named Bun-bun.

My parents are coming up to visit this weekend! I'll get to show them my lab and my project and take them all around Minneapolis :-) We'll probably go to the art museum and the sculpture gardens, and maybe the Mall of America. If you like malls a lot I guess that is the place to go, at least it certainly has a lot of stores. The only time I go there is to see movies. We have to go to matinees, cause the evening showings cost $8.75! In my home town it's $2.75 *laugh*


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Week 6 (July 9-15)

I am finally making a little more headway on my project. Knowing a few of the handy search tricks in emacs would have made my past five weeks so much easier! I was able to make some changes to the interface and I have a pretty good idea of where I need to go from here. It will take some time though. Today I am giving a presentation on the MAGNET project to the EE/CE group. I had trouble cutting it down to 10 minutes; there is a lot to say about that project!

Tuesday night Sarah and I went with the psychology REU students to the science museum. We got a guided tour of most of the exhibits and got to see a neat IMAX movie about caves! The IMAX theater was really interesting; it had one ordinary IMAX screen and then one that could be moved down to cover it that was curved like an OMNIMAX screen.

Tuesday Sarah and I also started making plans for a camping trip over the weekend! We got enlisted three of our friends, April and Rob and Ethan, found some supplies and a tent, and headed north. To see our pictures and stories from the trip click here.

Week 7 (July 16-22)

Not a lot happened this week. I made some more progress on my project - finishing one task and getting a good idea of how to start on the next one! I now need to be sure the user doesn't highlight conflicting rows on the chart, so I need to be thinking of the best way to inform the user of the error when it occurs. Interfaces are so interesting! I really enjoy thinking about ways to make them easier to use and understand.

I of course did some fun extra things too this week :-) A bunch of my friends came over to my room Tuesday, and we played 20 questions and 3-way speed until the wee hours. Also, since the 23rd is my birthday and the 24th is Mike's, we went to the zoo Sunday with a lot of people as our fun birthday activity! The Minnesota zoo is really nice. A lot of the exhibits are indoors, which is good because it was so hot outside! We saw tigers and a tapir and sharks and the dolphin show. There was also a neat butterfly house. I had so much fun! Mike brought his digital camera, of course, and took lots of pictures!

Week 8 (July 23-29)

The 23rd was my birthday, and I had a great day! My mentor, Dr. Gini, threw me a little suprise party in the lab :-) We had cheesecake and rubarb pie, yumm! That night I watched some of the EE/CE guys work on their computers, and they gave me a stuffed weasel for my a birthday present *laugh* So between the weasel and the rubarb pie and the zoo trip Sunday I had an awesome birthday!

On the note of guys fixing computers, one thing that is good about this summer is that I'm seeing how my computer science education compares to that given at larger universities. In programming experience I measure up just fine, but I am definitely behind in hardware knowledge. So I've been spending a lot of time watching people work on their computers, and I also borrowed a computer organization and architecture book to study in the evenings. Maybe when I go back to school my advisor can suggest a good independant study for me in that area!

Week 9 (July 30 - Aug 5)

This week will be the final week for my project. Dr. Gini and my grad student are leaving for a conference this weekend so I'll just be spending next week working on my web site and doing some closing activities. I did get the multiple selection to work, but I never figured out how to handle the case where the user selects two bids that cover the same task. The task table won't cause a problem, but how do you represent that in the Gantt chart? Where should the error message appear?

My fun activity for this week was a trip to the sculpture gardens! Rob, Nate, Ethan, Mike, Sarah and I all went. The flowers were beautiful, and the sculptures were neat too even though I didn't really get the point of most of them. We took lots of pictures!


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