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)
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.
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.
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 :-) 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.
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*
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.
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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!
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?