DREU Andrea Howells

Daily Life

Daily life was fairly routine this week. I'm starting to think ahead to week 10. I'm looking forward to seeing my daughters and returning to classes. I was registerd for only 15 credits for the fall semester and was looking at a few possible additional classes to bring that to 18 credits. Because of my work with this internship, I've decided to take the Computer Vision course offered at my university. I'd already registered for Introdution to Databases with Web Applications (3 credits), System Administration (1 credit), Perl (1 credit), Design and Analysis of Algorithms (3 credits), Ethics in the Age of Technology and Information (3 credits), Java (1 credit), and Operating Systems (3 credits). This will be a fun semester as 4 of these classes are primarily programming course work!

The pictures to the sides of my pages are a sort of story of my time at UNM. On this page, there is a picture of Rachel and a turtle, and yes, there is a story behind it. We had seen this turtle some 20-30 feet away from the pond. We thought we'd take some pictures of this adventerous creature, but little did we know it had ulterior motives. Rachel had brewed coffee fresh that morning as she did most mornings, and the turtle must have caught on to this on our frequent trips by and lay in waiting for us this particular morning. It distracted Rachel and caused her to drop her coffee. Of course, it gave absolutely no indication of having planned to do this and we still don't know how it managed to pull off the distraction. We didn't see the coffee stealing turtle again, but please, if you are in this area, beware and hold onto your coffee tightly!

Research

I've been working on the final report this week and have added the methods section, some figures and graphs and some references, all using Latex. I've also received assistance with the code. Additional work is needed to complete the debugging of the code.

On Thursday, we presented our research at the weekly Brown Paper Bag Lunch session. The students that attended presented an assortment of questions.

To view all the slides of the presentation, just click on the first slide and then scroll or arrow down (scrolling is much faster).

Next Week

For week 9, I will continue to modify programs needed for the PRMRoadmap_testSerial.map file and to prepare my draft final report. Once the programs are successfully modified, the code will be tested and data will be collected on parameters previously determined to be of interest. I will also continue to revise and add to my DREU website and submit a weekly report on the work done at the end of the week.