Daily Life
We've been enjoying listening to piano players in the SUB (Student Union Building) when we have our lunch. There's a baby grand piano near one of the seating areas, so we always choose seats nearby.
I've spent some time this week preparing applications for scholarships in order to attend the Grace Hopper convention in November and filing out forms for Girl Scout camp for my youngest daughter Sherri. Her first choice is Camp Cooking, then Horse Camp, then Hogwarts Expedition Camp.
On Saturday, Latha (one of the graduate students here) and I went to a nearby restaurant, Frontiers, for brunch. It's a nice fast order place with great food and friendly staff.
Research
This has been a particularly trying week. Although progress in modifying the code has been made, the current version is not able to compile.
I'm considering beginning with a fresh copy of the files.
The introduction of the final report was generated using LATEX. This program makes it easy to generate the report in a standard format for publishing.
On Thursday, we attended a weekly Brown Paper Bag Lunch session regarding various research being done at UNM on robotic applications. Dorian Arnold, Assistant Professor of CS, Joe Kniss, Assistant Professor of CS, and Stephanie Forrest, Professor and Chairman of CS. Dr. Forrest presented some results using a very interesting debugging program. This program was able to debug a major Zune issue that caused the Zune players to crash on 31 Dec, in 42 seconds. Afterwards Dr. Joe Kniss invited us to visit the ARTs laboratory and view a projection of the research being done on a dome that creates the illusion of being present in the image.
On Friday, we discussed the paper 'An Unsupervised Adaptive Strategy for constructing Probabilistic Roadmaps" (L. Tapia, S. Thomaw, B. Boyd, and N. Amato, 2009)'. This paper helps to answer 'where' and 'when' to use different sampling strategies. We also attended a STMC meeting on Planning for EAB meeting including overview of all projects addressing immunoreceptor signaling. All attendees of the STMC meeting were invited to attend the EAB meeting as well. Unfortunately, this meeting will occur on August 19, after my return home.
Next Week
For week 6, we will continue to modify programs needed for the PRMRoadmap_testSerial.map file. Once these files are successfully modified, they code will be tested in Vizmo and data will be collected on parameters previously determined to be of interest. I will continue to revise and add to my DREU website and at the end of the week, I will submit a weekly report on the work done.