Well, the first week started out very slowly. I am getting a bit worried
about this summer, like I always get about my summer experiences. I have such
high hopes for the summer, but I always get bummed out the first week or so
because I am worried I am not going to be able to get a hold of the project
well enough to really get started. On Monday, I met with Heather Metcalf, the other
student that is going to be working with Dr. Gini this summer. We decided to
go out to lunch to get to know each other better. We ate at a sports bar/cafe
called the Big 10. Nice to know where a sports bar is, in case I want to go
there sometime to watch baseball or something. We talked about our experiences
in the past, as well as our expectations for the summer. Heather drove up her
like I did, but her drive from Clarion, PA was 14.5 hours, whereas my drive
from Cincinnati was only about 13 hours, broken up.
On Tuesday,we met with Dr. Gini for the first time. She went over the two big projects that she has graduate students working on: MAGNET and LEGORobots. She gave us some papers to read about the two projects. We went out to a Vietnamese restaurant for lunch with her husband, Dan. I had never eaten Vietnamese before...It tasted like Chinese.
On Wednesday, I learned a little about MAGNET. It kind of frightened me
because it seemed to be really big. I don't exactly know where I would work on
it, because it seemed to me to be a really big, complex project with a lot
already done or already planned. Well, the same goes for the Lego Robots. Even
though I already know a fair amount, it still seems like they are working with
a time frame that is so tight, I don't know if I could do anything that would
really help the project. I mean, by the time I learn how to do something, they
would have already moved past that point. I feel like neither of the projects
really have something that I can jump right in with, but if I take the time to
learn the information, then the graduate students will have already passed up
my part. Hopefully my fears will be assuaged next week.
I have decided to work with the LEGO robots, since I already have a background in that field. I am hoping that I will be able to translate my work this summer into some sort of senior project for XU in the fall. I am going to be focusing on communication between robots through the use of something called a CMUcam and the use of different colored lights to mean different things. A really helpful graduate student named Chris sent me some information to read to try and get the CMU cam application/simulation working. We'll see....on to next week :)
On Monday, I worked on trying to understand the CMUcam. Paul, one of the graduate students who seems to kind of be in charge of this project, sent us a bunch of articles to read about homing and localization. There were a few of the articles that I could somewhat understand, although a lot of the articles seemed like they were written for people who already had some higher level knowledge about past research. For me, who is just starting, the articles were above my head and frustrating to read. I am getting really frustrated with this experience so far. I have not met with my mentor at all this week, we have not talked about what we are doing, we are just kind of showing up and trying to figure out things that will take up the day. After reading the articles, I explained to Heather about the HandyBoard a little bit. However,we were unable to run interactive C as we had not been added to the permission list. I tried to set up the CMU cam to work correctly with the Java GUI or the minicom program, but the camera was not being recognized. I decided tomorrow to try to work with the camera a little more and to try to figure out what was going on.
On Tuesday, I figured out that I was running things correctly with the
camera, the camera was simply not working. I switched cameras and got the
program to work. I noticed that the program would crash/ raise an exception,
when you continually got the mean of the colors. I also noticed that the
values for the blue were not really accurate. I decided to take a look at the
Java Code and try to see why this was. When I ran the mean values through
minicom, the values were more of the expected, although the blue wasn't as
good still. Therefore, I am assuming it is something about the Java GUI that
is written incorrectly for parsing the data with the mean values. After lunch,
I showed Heather how to solder some sensors. I also tried to get the camera to
work again, but I didn't have any luck. These cameras seem so fickle. I think
that could be a possible problem (the consistency). It appears as though the
power supply to the cameras is not very stable and is causing the cameras to
go in and out. I thought that I would maybe try to get a good sensor tomorrow.
I also taught Heather how to solder today. I taught her how to solder in
general, and she soldered a touch sensor. I showed her how to tin the wire,
apply the heat tubing, deal with the pins, and the diagrams. The sensor worked
too, which is a plus. I am getting a little frustrated. She has been learning
a fair amount: IC, the handyboards, how to solder, some Java. I have not
really been learning a lot. I have learned about the CMUcam, but that was just
reading through the documentation. I have not done any real coding, I 've only
been a guinea pig, I feel like, running around doing little things here and
there. Hopefully, I will figure out something significant to work on.
On Wednesday, we went to a writing seminar about how to do better
writing. It was an afternoon thing, but it was from 1-5, so we just went to
that, instead of coming in. The other grad students were in the process of
moving to a new building, so we wouldn't have been able to do anything beside
move boxes, which is really not why I came here this summer :)
On Thursday, I tried to figure out what was going on with the CMUcam.
Whenever I tried to run the mean values for an extended period, it would crash
and raise an exception. My goal was to find out why. I went over to Chris to
ask him to try to run the mean values, so I could see what the specific
exception was, and run a GREP to find out where it was occuring, but he said
that he was not getting the exception any more. Sure enough, it was working
fine. I kept looking though, because the blue values were not really what they
should have been. I found a spot, where, when checking boundary conditions for
the colors, it resets the red, green, and blue values. However, for the lower
boundary, it was not resetting the blue value, but instead resetting the red
value again. Although I don't think this would really affect the main problem,
it was definitly a mistake. Chris corrected it. At least I have done
something. After lunch, we decided to try to do some testing for the CMUcam
and the beacons. We needed to find out what colors had the greatest difference
when the light was turned off versus turned on. We had to experiment with
different colors, and different materials. We rigged up a light circuit so we
could easily turn the lights off and on. This was easier said then done. I
took apart one of those infomercial touch lights to try and figure out the
circuit. I drew one up, what I thought would work. We tried it out, and ended
up burning out four lights. We couldn't figure out why the circuit was causing
the lights to blink and then not work...until we figured out we had too much
voltage and were frying the lights. After fixing that problem, we had a
working circuit. That was exciting, although it was really an easy circuit.
After that long experience, we began testing. We found that a red candle
votive worked the best when put under the dome light and lit up. There was the
greatest difference in color between the lit light and the dark light. Plus,
there was the added bonus that red is one of the three RGB colors, and so with
this light, we are only really concerned with one of the values, as opposed to
more complex colors like purple.
On Friday, we met with Dr.Gini. I felt a lot better after the meeting. I
had originally thought that we had to work on one of the projects that the
team was working on for the AAAI conference. With those projects, I felt like
there would be too steep of a learning curve, and I couldn't really do any
work that would help them out. However, she said that she would prefer that we
come up with something that we were interested in, and then work on that. She
said that if it could be integrated into the robots for the AAAI competition,
then it would be good because we could be included in the paper that they did.
However, if it wasn't needed, that would still be fine. She would like us to
work on something that interested us. She said that is what graduate school is
like. I have a couple of ideas, although I still don't know if they are going
to work. Some of my ideas were to improve upon the way the robot deals with
picking up targets, because it seemed from the video that it bumps into them
and misses alot, as well as working with implementing the beacon behavior.
That afternoon, we worked with Chris and Esra building our own CMU cams. That
was a tedious and sometimes frustrating experience, but it felt really nice
when the cameras actually worked. Solder leaves room for a fair amount of
mistakes, surprisingly :)
On Monday, I decided to try to see the behaviors of the robots when they
hone in on targets. The code, I found, is really complex. I think that it
looked really sensible, and so I was going to try to set the robots up myself
and see how they react. I tried a long time, but was unsuccessful. I decided I
would ask the group at the meeting how to do it. Chris showed us these new
sensors that they have, Sharp IR detectors. Our plan changed a little when we
saw these sensors. I think that we are going to focus on this aspect of the
robots now for our project. The sensors give the ability to tell distances
from objects between the ranges of 10cm and 80cm away. We started out trying
to learn about the different sensors, figuring out which would be best and
building one of the first ones. We met with the group for the weekly meeting,
and told them about our experience with the colors and our various ideas. We
also learned what other people were doing. Paul said that he would show us the
robots in action tomorrow, which will be really helpful, because then we could
do some testing.
On Tuesday, we started out the morning with Paul. He showed us how to set
the robots up, and how to load various programs onto the robots. It is a
pretty complicated setup, but it was really helpful to see the robots in
action. Their behaviors when hitting the target differred a lot compared to
the behaviors on the video, so I am glad I did not spend a long time trying to
fix what really wasn't broken. He also showed us how to "cut a trace" so that
we could wire up the D12 IR sensors and work with those. After lunch, we
decided to experiment with the sensors, and try to write a simple wall
follower to look at the easy and range of the sensors. This turned out to be
really hard. The main problem with the sensors is that, when closer then 10cm
, the values are not accurate at all. This makes setting boundary conditions
difficult, because 1) the values are not linear to begin with, and 2) the
values are really difficult to pin down. We decided to think about how we
could fix this, as well as other uses for the sensors.
On Wednesday, I worked on my journal for a little bit and I thought that I
might start learning LaTex. This is not something really helpful now, but Dr.
Gini suggested using this summer to learn it. She said that it was really
helpful to know how to use for Grad School. We also looked for more
information about different sensors and improving upon this sensor. We learned
that the reading on the sensor is more accurate when the sensor is turned
vertically. However, I am still not that thrilled with the readings that we
are getting from the sensor. We also moved the sensor back on the robot so
that the IR sensor was almost 10 cm from the side of the robot, which allowed
us to have the robot move closer to objects and still have correct readings.
On Thursday, we decided to try and make a light circuit. We had previously
created on that worked with a touch sensor. However, we needed to be able to
use the digital output from the handyboard to control the light turning on and
off. These ports are on the expansion board, which I had never used before. In
order to do this, we talked to Paul, who suggested using a relay. We searched
around on the Web and found a webpage of a school project where they created a
light switch circuit. We decided to go to Radio Shack. After a long adventure
to Radio Shack (who would have guessed that East University St. turns into
West University St. when driving East), where we discovered they didn't have
our 500 ohm low voltage low current relays, we got some different relays to
work with. We wired up the circuit, plugged it in, and ..... nothing. We
realized that the handyboard digital output is not outputting enough current
to drive the coil. When we switched it to the motor ports, however, which
output more voltage and current, it worked. We would still prefer to use the
digital ports, because we have more of these available and won't drain current
from the handyboard.
On Friday, we attempted to create our circuit with a different relay.
However, this one still required too much current (we only have about 25mA to
work with). I contacted the person who had the circuit description online to
find out where they got their relay from, and Paul was going to look for some
other relays. We had our group meeting today. We talked about where everyone
was. Heather and I decided to try to work on the IR sensors next week,
creating a lookup table.
On Monday, Heather and I decided to try to figure out the IR sensors. The
sensors give different readings from distances of 10cm to 80 cm. The readings
that the sensors give you are between 0 and 255 - higher numbers means closer
value. There was not a lookup table for the IR sensors, so Heather and I
decided to try and create a function that we could input the reading from the
sensor into and then would output a distance. We took readings from three
sensors from 10cm to 80cm, every 2 cm. We entered these values into a
spreadsheet and then did a power regression to try to best fit these values to
a curve. We did various different regressions, one for each of the three
values, as well as one for the average of the three readings.
On Tuesday, we decided to try to use Maple to graph the points and the
equations that we got from the regressions. However, the University doesn't
use Maple and so we used Mathematica to solve for various x-values to add to
our spreadsheet and tried to find a different way to graph our equation. We
also figured out the error for the functions. We had all sorts of problems
trying to get Mathematica and MatLab to work. Dr. Gini told us how to get
Matlab and Mathematica to work on the Suns. However, we kept having all sorts
of problems getting the programs to work. I decided to bring the Maple CD in
the next day and we could use that.
On Wednesday, we got Maple to work and graphed our functions and our
points. Once we had all the different values, we decided to try to manipulate
the equations in order to eliminate the floating point values from it, in
order for the Handyboard to be able to compute values more quickly. We
eventually got an equation, although it still had floating point values and
was not exactly accurate. However, it errored on the conservative side, which
meant that the values overestimated the distances, thinking it is closer that
it actually is, which would prevent it from falling over the edge, or hitting
something.
On Thursday, I kept working on the regression equation, finishing it up and
writing up a little function in IC to use that converted the values. I had a
little bit of a problem with casting the integer values into float values and
vice versa. However, I figured it out fairly quickly. Heather built a relay
and it didn't work, so I tried one and it didn't work either. However, we took
the resistors off and the relay seemed to work. We decided to go buy a bunch
of lightbulbs and different kinds of containers. Paul had recommended that we
try to get different colors of Saran Wrap to use for the different colors, so
we went to Rainbow and got some rose colored and green colored and after much
confusion, bought appropriate light bulbs. When we came back, we hooked up our
relays again but they didn't work. They would turn on but wouldn't turn off.
If I hit them, they seemed to work, so I think that somehow the coil relay
switch is getting stuck. We had a MinDart meeting with the whole group today.
Maria came and we talked about what is left to do. The group decided that it
would be better to hold off on the IR sensors for now and focus on the
beacons. Heather and I were in charge of trying to figure out different
behaviors. Maria made it sound like we would be able to actually code the
behaviors later, which would make me happy, since I had assumed that we would
get to actually code this summer. The work that we have been doing has taken a
lot of time, so work is going fast. However, I feel like the work hasn't
really taken any brain power. It has been a lot of soldering and creating
circuits, which is interesting, but I don't feel like I have learned a huge
amount. Last summer was kind of like that as well. However, I think that I
have to realize that when you are in AI with robots like these, there is going
to be a fair amount of work involved that is more hardware instead of coding.
On Friday, we met with Paul to discuss the various different behaviors and
to see where we could put the behaviors in terms of the finite state machine.
We also tried the various types of plastic wraps with the cameras. The red
worked pretty well, although it is not as bright as the red candle holder. The
best part of the day was the afternoon. Maria had arranged a speaker, Holly
Yanco, to come and give a guest talk. She is a professor at the University of
Massachusetts - Lowell, and got her degree from MIT. She was in town for a
convention and she came to talk. Before her talk, Maria arranged a group
discussion and lunch. A bunch of people from the UMN CS dept (students and
professors) were there, as well as the other CRA-DMP students and some other
REU students from Augsburg College in town. The lunch was really good - Maria
had gotten a lot of different Italian foods,like this really good pasta salad
and different kinds of wraps. The talk was all about graduate school. The
people who were in grad school as well as the professors talked about
different things. I had talked to Maria about wanting to be a prof at a
smaller liberal arts college, and it seemed like that was the focus of the
conversation. There were two teachers there who were teachers at small
colleges and they shared their experiences. It made me feel better, because
some of the people were saying that you don't have to know exactly what you
want to do when you go into graduate school. However, you should make sure
that what you do pick, you truly like a lot, because if you don't, you will
have a hard time trying to get your doctorate degree. They also highly
recommended that I try to get some TA-ing when I am in grad school for
experience, or even adjunct somewhere. That is a good idea. They also said
that if your phd school offers a preparing future faculty type of class, it is
beneficial to take it. I think that I still really want to teach, but I don't
know that I want to go to graduate school. I was hoping that this summer would
make my decision clearer about if I want to go to graduate school, but it
hasn't so far. I don't know what I would want to go for. How do you know, just
after our undergraduate schooling? I suppose I have to get in somewhere first
though :) After the talk, Holly gave her presentation. She had been working on
a Robotic Wheelchair called Wheelesley. I thought
that her presentation was great, because it was very straight forward for me
to understand. Her topic was something that I had never thought of before. I
had always thought of AI as only robotics. However, there is so much more.
This topic seemed great to me because it would feel like I was doing something
usefull, as well as kind of combining two different fields. I really thought
that this day was very helpful. This is what I had pictured my summer would be
like, and I am very grateful that Maria organized this event. Next week, I am
going to be going home for a break :) so I will be working on my webpage as
well as coming up with some behaviors.
This week I am at home in sunny Cincinnati, so I am doing some work through
the Internet. I have come up with some different behaviors for the robots in
terms of the beacons. Heather reported to me, after I emailed her ideas, that
there had been a MinDart meeting and they had decided what kind of behavior to
do. They decided that, to start, the robot will turn its beacon on when they
have one target already in their gripper and have sighted another target.
Since they originally stop at that point and localize so that they can go back
to this area and get their other target, they now will turn on their light for
informing the other robots and turn it off when they are done localizing.
Other robots will see this light and more toward it only if it is not doing
anything else. If the light turns off when the robot is moving toward it, then
the robot will just continue to go straight for a little bit and then if it
does not see the beacon again, it will just go back to its normal routine.
Heather, Harini, and Esra also figured out a better light scheme for the
beacon. They are using four different colored Christmas tree like bulb
coverings that give the beacon a tie-dyed appearance that the CMUcam thinks is
white, which is good because there are very high confidence levels. Heather
also got the Jameco relays in.
When I got back, Heather had created this little circuit with the relays
and the lights. However, I thought that we should try the big 9V lights
instead of the little lights since they were using 9V of batteries. We plugged
them into the breadboard circuit and it turned the bright lights on - and then
wouldn't turn them off....We broke another relay :( However we put 2 lights on
one port with the 100 ohm resistor, as depicted in the online diagram, and it
seemed (for now) to work nicely, although with these relays, they seem to be
flakey. So, we were able to use the 9V lights and sockets from the EE shop,
which was really nice because you only have to solder the socket, not the many
light bulbs. I was in charge of soldering the sockets and I dripped solder
onto my leg- some 800 degrees farenheit of melted lead - not very fun. We took
a practice GRE today that the EE prof, Dr. Ernie, had set up for us. I did
okay, although my Math section was suprisingly very low - the lowest ever for
me. I know that I just have to get used to having it on computer and not being
able to directly write on the test, which is what I was taught to do.
On Tuesday, Heather showed me what she had done with the camera the week before . Well, she tried to show me. We were unable to really get the cameras working. It seems like they are very very flakey and difficult to use. We finally got it to work and she showed me how they calculated the confidence for the lights and the three cones used for localization. We also went to one of the EE presentations to get an idea of what we should do for our presentation. We are going to give a powerpoint presentation on the second to last week we are here. Heather kept on working on coming up with a layout for the perf board and I kept soldering the light sockets. It was tough at first, because the solder wouldn't stay on, but I worked out a system after a bit and really flew threw the rest of them.
On Wednesday, Heather showed me the perf board circuit layout that she had come up with. It didn't work, so I decided to try to make one, in case hers didn't work because of some soldering mistake. However, mine didn't work either. It was frustrating to try and make these boards, because the boards were really small and the connections that we had to make overlapped. Heather was leaving tomorrow to go home for her friend's wedding and so I thought that I would work on reworking the layout of the boards to see if I could get a simpler layout for soldering. We got an email from Holly Yanco, the woman who came to speak to us about being a woman in CS. She is the chair of the AAAI conference this year. She got some money from the NSF for undergraduate students interested in AI and robotics to come to the conference. We filled out the scholarship form. It would be really neat to go to the conference for two main reasons: Paul and Chris are going, so we would be able to see the MinDART team in action, and secondly, it would be really cool to go do Canada. The conference is in Edmonton, Alberta, which is way to the north above the state of Montana approximately.
On Thursday, I took Heather to the airport in the morning, and then I worked on my webpage a little bit. After lunch, I decided to try to get the light circuit working. I made a new one, with only one socket on the board so it would be a little simpler. I made sure no wires were even touching but it still didn't work. Paul told me to try to do a continuity check, which is pretty much checking the resistance of the wire to see if there are other wires touching it. I checked all of the wires but there are none that touch . I put in the relay and power supply and checked all of the voltages, and they seem to be doing fine. It just won't work. It is really frustrating.
On Friday, I still couldn't get the circuit to work so Paul stepped in to help me out. He double checked all of the easy things to check, like voltage from the power supply and voltage from the handyboard, handyboard signal, etc. Then we started trying to figure out why it would be working on the breadboard and not working on the perf board. He hypothesized that we might need a diode to stop the flow going across the current when there is no power to it (the excess current from right before the power is removed that is) but I didn't really understand why that would be happening, and it didn't work either. Then, by accident, we came to a solution. We had been placing the relay socket so that both sides of the pins were on the same row in the breadboard, meaning that they were essentially connected. However, when Paul moved the socket so that the sides were not connected, as in our perf board, the breadboard circuit didn't work either. Upon looking on the picture, we saw that both sides of the relay pins were connected except for pins 6 and 9. When we connected them with a wire: Voila! The relay worked. This seemed like a solution, until Paul thought of something else. The diagram that they gave us was incorrect. Instead of pin 1 being on the top left hand corner of the circle side,as depicted in the diagram, it was really on the bottom left hand corner of the circle side. So, it had worked on the breadboard because all of the sides were connected, and we were, by connecting to pin 9, also connecting to pin 6. However, on the perf board, we were only connecting to pin 9, without a connection to pin 6, which is what we needed. So, all I had to do was switch the socket around and use the other side of the pins. It was still really frustrating because the diagram was incorrect and we struggled with solving the problem. However, it was a relief when we got it solved. So, for the rest of the day, I worked on finishing up our circuits. However, when we testing, it seemed as though the relays were acting up. WHen we would turn the lights off, they would sometimes not go off. We ended up sticking some resistors on before the lights, so there was not as much current going through the relay, and this seemed to get the job done. However, the resistors got really hot and so we needed ones with higher wattage. I decided to go to radio shack and look for some low ohm high watt resistors. Hopefully this will solve our problem of the light relays. I got 3 done, and we still had 5 to go. I also got word that we got all of our funding to go to the conference, so we get to go to AAAI in Canada! I was really excited and I called Heather at home, and she checked and she had also gotten funding. We decided to buy our plane tickets right then, because it was only 2 weeks away. We decided on a flight, but when I went to buy tickets, it was fine, but when Heather went to buy the tickets 2 seconds later, it said it was sold out. She ended up getting 3 of the 4 flights the same as me and is going to go standby for the other flight to try to get the same one as me.
On Monday, I went into work for a little bit before I had to pick up Heather from the airport. I finished another circuit and did some other work. When I picked up Heather, she was really exhausted and so we decided to just come over to my house and work on getting all of our plans for AAAI settled. We got our student housing and we also decided to look at what the past CRA-DMP students had written for their final report. This gave us an idea of how long ours should be. After that, Heather went home to sleep.
On Tuesday, Heather and I finished up the circuits. I dripped hot solder on my leg, just like Heather had done earlier. It really burned and is definitly going to leave a scar. Yikes...I want to wear pants every day now. We tested out some more resistors and found that 2 ohm 5 watt resistors work nicely.
On Wednesday, we finished up the relays, tidying them up. We also color coded the packets so that you could tell which wires went with which ports and which sockets. We also mounted the relays on lego pieces, which made them sturdier and also allowed them to fit inside the robot. Paul also showed us how to change the robots so that they have a wider chassis, which would fix some of the problems the robots had with picking up targets. This basically amounted to removing all of the pieces down to the chassis and rebuilding. This was a significant project.
We kept working on remodeling the robots on Thursday. Some of them were built poorly to begin with, so we had a lot of changes to make. Esra started to help us towards the end, but by then we were having some giddy-ness associated with being couped up in a room with a bunch of lego pieces for too long. We finished up the robots finally on Thursday night.
On Friday, we had to rewire some of the sensors, and make new wire extenders for our relays so that every wire could go through a channel underneath the handyboard and stay out of sight. Chris came in today and told us that he isn't going to the conference because his wife is pregnant and she is having really bad morning sickness. That is too bad, because it would have been fun with a whole group of people. Paul is really happy now that we are coming because otherwise he would have had to do everything by himself.
We did, guess what, more soldering on Monday. However, we ran out of male and female header strips, shrink wrap, etc. The shop, where we have been spending loads of money getting supplies this summer, is out of what we need, so they are going to have to order it. Hopefully they will have it in by Friday, because we will need to bring it to the conference with us in case the robots break. Dr. Gini is coming back on Thursday from Italy. It will be nice to touch base with her, since we haven't seen her in 3 weeks. The rest of this week was filled with mundane work, but it had to be done for the conference. We made a lot of spare cables and fixed up the relays. The relay lights were still not turning off consistently, so we had to up the resistance of the lights a little so that they were 4 ohm and so that required rewiring a bunch of light packets. We installed the servo boards to the handyboard and tested out the sensors and the cameras for the robots. We also worked on writing our abstract. We are presenting at a summer student symposium for research that a bunch of REU students are presenting at. Dr. Ernie set it up for us. I actually got to do some coding this week. I added a test program for the lights that was added to the test program that tests all of the sensors for the robots. Woo Hoo! We also took the practice GRE again. I did better in math and analytical, but worse in verbal. I think that I need to just practice at speed and then I will get a higher score. They are changing the gre starting in October. They are getting rid of the analytical part and replacing it with writing. I definitly want to take it before they do that because the analytical is the best part for me. I had writing and I don't think they will be able to score it as fairly. At the end of this week, we met with Maria. She is going to be leaving right when we get back from the conference. We will see her one more time for this summer, that first Monday back. We talked with Paul and packed everything up. Heather and I have to each take 1 box that both weigh about 40 pounds on our trip with us. It is going to be a pain because we have to switch planes in Toronto and go through customs there. I only have a 1 hour layover and I am worried I will miss my other flight since I have to be getting this big box. We leave for Edmonton on Saturday morning around 10:20.
We attended the AAAI Conference in Edmonton, Alberta this week. It was a great experience. I have never been to a conference before and I learned a lot. I have some ideas for my senior project at XU. It was a lot of fun to be able to be at a conference where you got reimbursed for food. I got to truly experience Edmonton cuisine - They have a lot of bistros there. As a scholarship recipient, we had to write a paper about our experiences. This is what I had to say about my AAAI experience:
As an attendee at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference in Edmonton, Alberta, I learned many interesting things. I attended two tutorial sessions, as well as one of the IAAI Presidential Address regarding Urban Search and Rescue at the World Trade Center by Robin Murphy. In addition, I attended the AAAI Presidential talk regarding Artificial Intelligence and Brain Science. I also watched various Botball Competitions, Robot Rescue Competition, and the Exhibition.
I have never attended a conference before. I am an undergraduate student from Xavier University in Cincinnati. Xavier does not have any in-house research experiences for undergraduates in computer science. As a result, my research experiences have been limited to Lego Robotics for two summer research projects. My experience in AI had been in the field of robotics. AAAI showed me various facets of artificial intelligence and sparked my interest in the fields of Natural Language processing and the role of artificial intelligence in biological fields such as brain science. Through AAAI, I now have various ideas about different fields of AI that I could examine in my senior research project at Xavier University.
In addition to learning about different fields of AI, I was able to see how the field of AI is interwoven with many of the other ideas and topics that I have learned about in computer science. I was able to see how my knowledge of parse trees and grammars from my Compiler class at Xavier University was a large part of natural language processing. In addition, I was able to learn about the different aspects that go into programming large autonomous robots are very similar to the aspects of programming my small Lego robots.
I had a wonderful experience at the conference. Seeing all of the different fields of AI opened up my mind. Instead of simply focusing on robotics, I would like to integrate other areas of AI into my senior research. AAAI provided me a great opportunity to meet graduate students and professionals in the field. I was able to make great contacts at other universities and business. In addition, I was able to talk to Elizabeth Sklar from Columbia University about her work with integrating robotics into the classroom as well as interesting younger students in the field of artificial intelligence and more specifically robotics.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to attend this conference. My research work this summer with the University of Minnesota focused on Lego Robotics. Paul Rybski, the graduate student I am working with, had the robots as an exhibition at this conference. Because of the NSF, I was able to attend this conference and present the robots with Paul. This was an excellent opportunity for me. I gained confidence about my abilities through the various explanations and presentations that the Exhibition provided me.
There are a few suggestions that I have about the scholarship program provided by the NSF. I think that it would be beneficial for all of the scholarship students to meet the other scholarship undergraduate students on the first night. This would give the students the opportunity to know at least a few other people, as well as providing a time to discuss various questions they may have about he other student's experiences in the field of computer science. I know that when I met Amelia, another scholarship student, and we were discussing our computer science background, we had similar fears and questions about the future. Hearing that I was not the only student experiencing this was very beneficial to me. That is the only main suggestion that I have for the scholarship program. I really enjoyed the pizza party that Holly Yanco threw for the students, professors, and graduate students. It allowed us to meet other people who could answer my questions. This meeting should definitely continue. I am really grateful for the opportunity to attend AAAI that the scholarship from the NSF provided me.
I was really excited this week because I thought that I was going to get to do some testing. I had been planning on running the test experiments on the robots so that I would be able to see how my work affected the overall timing of the search and retrieval task. Paul had told us how to modify the code to get it working for the different test cases. Jeff and I had come in and unpacked the boxes this weekend, so we were all set to go. We met with Dr. Gini on Monday for a couple of hours. She is leaving Tuesday so this was our last experience meeting with her. We talked about a lot of things in general, but then also about graduate schools. She gave me some suggestions about different programs as well as suggestions for writing essays and applying for fellowships. She offered to read our essays and write letters for us, which is helpful. On Tuesday, Heather didn't come in because she wasn't feeling well, so I worked on getting the robots set up and made our poster board slides. THis way, we just have to print them out and put them on the posterboard. On Wednesday, we tried to start running the tests. HOwever, we were having major camera problems. They were not recognizing the colors and were simply just not working. I had made all of the corrections, I thought, that would have fixed any changes made in Edmonton for lighting and colors. However, it was still not working. Paul made a couple of suggestions, but I could not fix the code to work. We didn't want to run the tests with the robots not acting optimally, because then we couldn't compare the data to the previous test. SO, it was a bit of a bummer because I would have liked to have some test data to show how our work made a difference. Oh well. On Thursday, there was a poster symposium for the EE and CE group that we were invited to. People of course thought the robots were cute and asked some questions about if they actually worked. Friday, we presented our poster at the summer research symposium with all of the other summer student research work. That wrapped up my summer at with the DMP.