Week 1 May 30th - June 5th
During my first week at me REU, all of the participants had not made it yet and the ones that were there we all pretty much became well aquainted with each other as well as the mentors. On Wednesday we met with our head mentor Dr. Gilbert and recieved our projects we for the summer, we were all assigned atleast 2 different projects. My main project was iCAR reasearch, pretty much making it easier for owners of a vehicle to access there owners manuel while driving, instead of reaching for a book the operator will say a command to the car and the best possible answer will be recited to them through the speakers also giving the page to find the solution in the manuel book. As well as meeting mentors and recieving my projects I had to complete citi training in order to be able to do any type of testing on human subjects.The training and certification involved reading and understanding very long papers including the Belmont Report and so forth. After which a required test was taken to examine our knowledge of the information that was read.
Week 2 June 6th - June 12th
In my second week at clemson, I met with my team leader, and I was giving the assignment of finding a driving simulator for our research being that the one we had didnt meet our requirements. We needed a simulator with curvy roads, pedestrians, traffic distractions and it had to record how many times the driver ran into the other lane or off the road. the simulator we had did all of those except have curvy roads, and thats critical.
Week 3 June 13th - June 19th
On the third week, me and my team came to a conclusion on a good driving simualtor software for our project. We worked on our IRB's for the project, which are the protocols needed in order to be able to human subjects in different studies and experiments. This week was alot of fun, I learned how to use HTML and make slideshows using a mechanism called slideshoPro. I was in charge of finding a good simulator software and the company that I found was AplusB software, they're really good and they have very good simulators softwares to offer, but it turns out they werent that easy to find. Earlier in the week, one of our mentors held a grad school seesion telling us, the REU students, what to expect and what grad school is like just in case we had questions and maybe wanted to attend grad school.
Week 4 June 20th - June 26th
In my fourth week me and my group worked more on the ITech part for our project. We had to come up with responses that the car would read to the driver for different questions. The BMW manual is 287 pages long and alot of our questions that we had to find responses for would have the same answer. One of the other mentors hosted dinner at their house for all of the REU students. Earlier in the week one of the Professors here at Clemson did a presentation about algorithms and finding shortests path, and the research his team is working on, he talked about genetics and how the algorithms they're working on are trying to find sick genes in people who are ill. Next week we plan to finally work on the simulator, and give demos.
This week the simulator software finally arrived, and I did some testing on it myself to see all the available features and capabilities. Also this week we met with a representative from BMW about maybe being able to use one of there new cars for our ITech study, and the meeting went well. Unfortunately they probably won't get the car by the time the DREU is over, so none of us will get to drive it. Outside of the lab, me and some other students went downtown to a local restaurant/club for fun, we met some of the locals and other students that go here as well, Clemson is a very small place.
This week we moved the simulator and all the the hardware(CPU, moniters, DVR, Steering Wheel, etc) to the location where we will be holding the studies at. Also rwe got the IRB approval for us to be able to do the studies. We have 4 weeks left and iour mentor reminded us that we needed to get started on our posters for the REU website. I'm very excited about making a poster being that I've never made one before and I will be able to enter it in different competitions and differents conferences I attend. At the end of our work days me and some of the other students play Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in the lab on the 55' TVs.
This week we finally got an IRB approval for one of the other projects that some of the other REU students are working on, the project called Prime 3 which is a virtual voting system design to make it easy for people with disabilities to be able to vote, the subject studies will start the next week. As far as my main project, ICar/ITech we finally got the 40 inch LCD TV and set up the room where we will be doin the test runs and studies, it came out looking pretty nice. This next week coming up will be a busy week for all of us, we are approaching the deadline for our posters and we will all be working on that as well as our different projects. This will be very fun being that its my first ever poster, and we have to present them next week and I heard that prizes will be givin out for the best posters. On another note, I'm looking forward to playing volleyball this wednesday, since I missed it last week, we sort of started a weekly thing of playing volleyball.
This was really busy, I worked really hard on my poster and finished it by the end on the week. For it to be my first poster it came out pretty good, my first version of the poster was destroyed by the grad students when they critiqued it, but after some minor changes I was able to win their approval. Next week we have to give demos and present our posters to a group of high school student and the general public and then there is a poster competition at the end of the week between all the REU students.
This week was pretty much a wrap up week, being that we will not be able to run my projects studies this summer, I pretty much focused on my poster for the competition at the end of the week. The competition went very good, I believe I did very good being that it was my first time ever presenting a poster. Unfortunately I didnt win none of the cash prizes though. To celebrate, one of the graduate assistants had a pool party later on that day, had a blast! This next coming up is my last week here, and is pretty much a free week because the presentations and everything are over. I will continue to work on other projects to take up my time.
The last week was full of packing and goodbyes, really didnt do much work during this week because I left in the middle of the week. To celerate everyone leaving we had a get together and everybody that was still there all went out on the town and we had a blast.