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| Week 1 |
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Since I will be working on a joint project with Stephanie Gulley--we will each be a part of the same
project but will be working on different components within that project--Dr. Zhang gave us both
several papers to read that helped introduce us to the topics we would be working with this summer.
We have also had daily meetings with Dr. Zhang where we can get help with any problems we have
encountered since the last meeting. In addition to this, Dr. Zhang has given us an assignment from
one of his graphics courses so that we could start understanding some of the concepts we will be
using this summer and start becoming familiar with OpenGL. The completed assignment, which includes a
description of what concepts were learned along with the assignment itself will be posted upon
completion. Dr. Zhang explained a lot of the theory behind the problems this week, and I completed
Problem 1 and began Part a of Problem 3.
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| Week 2 |
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This week, I continued working on the assignment from week 1 where I am learning about how to do
surface coloring based on specific properties of the model, construct bounding boxes (both
axis-aligned bounding boxes and bounding boxes based on the model's orientation), and calculate and
display the silhouette of a 3D model. Problem 2 and Problem 3 Part a of this assignment are now
complete, and the goal is to complete Problem 3 Part b by the end of the weekend, at which time the
report will be posted on this page. To help me understand important concepts and work through some of
the problems in the assignment, daily meetings with Dr. Zhang have continued, and I have read through
the first four chapters of the OpenGL Red Book.
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| Week 3 |
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I can't believe how much I have learned this week! I finally finished project one and the report for
it, and it has helped me gain valuable insight both about graphics concepts I will use later in the
research and also about coding and debugging principles that will be applicable no matter what area
of computer science in which I am working. Links to finished reports can be found at the bottom of
this page. Next week, Stephanie and I will be working more closely with Jonathan, one of Dr. Zhang's
graduate students who is working on an area of research that is related to the research topic
Stephanie and I will be working on later in the summer.
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| Week 4 |
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This week has definitely been challenging. I am learning many new graphics concepts in addition to
becoming more familiar with OpenGL and solidifying C concepts I previously did not really understand.
I spent most of this week understanding the graphics theory introduced in the second assignment and
what is necessary to implement the different ideas presented there. Stephanie and I have continued
daily meetings with Dr. Zhang and are now having daily meetings with Jonathan as well, which has
helped us be able to move more quickly on this project than we did during the first one. During those
meetings, we discussed new topics like corner tables, surface smoothing, Morse design and a bit of
texture synthesis. At this point, I haven't been able to implement more than the corner tables--and
getting corners to play nicely with vertices has proven to be challenging--but I am much more
confident about the material than I was when working on the code for assignment one.
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| Week 5 |
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Daily meetings with both Dr. Zhang and Jonathan continued this week. Because of the frequency of our
discussions, I was able to implement all but the very last step of the second assignment (the texture
mapping), which means that early next week I will be able to move on to the final exercise before I
can really start to work on the actual research project. I am enjoying everything I am learning--both
in terms of academics and advice about grad school. So far, this experince has been incredible, and I
am so grateful that I have been able to participate in this program.
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| Week 6 |
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This week, I was able to wrap up project two (link to the report included at the bottom of the page). I have
also continued to have daily meetings with Dr. Zhang and Jonathan, and that was extremely beneficial in
finishing this project. The conclusion of project two meant I was also able to begin reading several papers
in order to better determine which research project I will be working on for the remainder of my time here.
In addition, I was also able to start attending weekly department picnic lunches where I have met several
professors, graduate students, and visiting undergraduate/high school students. It has been great to get to
know some new people and to be able to gain new perspectives from them.
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| Week 7 |
This week has been busy but good. I spent most of the week reading and gaining an understanding of two
different papers, one of which my research project will be based on. The first detailed an approach to
making a quad cover mesh and that project would invlove implementing the algorithm that paper descibed. The
other paper was about Morse decompositions of vector fields. Originally, I was going to work on the project
that deals with quad cover meshes. I would have been building on preexisting code (from Jonathan); however,
my laptop uses the Intel chipset instead of a graphics card and the program I needed to modify used shaders,
which require a graphics card. Because this would prevent me from being able to visually inspect my results,
Stephanie and I switched projects (her laptop was able to run the program) so I am currently working on the
Morse decomposition project.
One of the most exciting things about this week was that I was able to have a meeting and exchange some
emails with two professors in other departments at OSU. It was interesting to be able to hear about the
experiences that brought them to their current position and to ask them questions regarding graduate school.
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| Week 8 |
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I continued to work on the Morse decomposition project this week. I am working with several simple models
(the sphere, the torus, and the Stanford bunny) whose covering space is the product of 4-RoSy fields. At
this point, my work is focused on finding a way to visualize the Morse Connection Graph (shows the
connections between Morse sets) after running Morse decomposition on the covering sapce so that meaning can
be extracted from the results. For the most part, daily meetings with Dr. Zhang continued; however, he is
currently at a conference so we will be communicating through email for the duration of the conference.
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| Week 9 |
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I cannot believe that my time here is almost done--it seems like this research experience has just flown by!
This week, I continued to work with the program written by Guoning that does Morse Decomposition. Most of
the week was focused on figuring out how to visualize the results of the Morse Decomposition. Since Dr.
Zhang was at a conference, I had meetings and exchanged emails with Guoning and Jonathan and continued
communication with Dr. Zhang through email to continue moving forward with the research.
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| Week 10 |
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Upon Dr. Zhang's return this week, we continued daily meetings to help wrap up the research. Looking back
over the past 10 weeks, I am surprised at how much I was able to learn in that short amount of time. In
addition to all of the research, I was also able to come away from this experience with a much better
understanding of what to expect in grad school. All in all, this experience has definitely been positive,
and I am sincerely thankful that I got the opportunity to participate in the DREU program.
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