Week 1: June 17 - 21
I arrived in the beautiful city of Chicago last week, and settled into my new living quarters just a few blocks away from the DePaul building. I spent the week exploring the city and enjoyed the various attractions. I went up the Willis tower, visited the Shedd/Field/Adler museums and walked around numerous quarters of the city famed for the architecture. I was now fully geared and excited to start my internship!
I met my mentor, Dr. Wolfe on the first day and talked a little about the project I will be doing. I spent the next few days installing the necessary software to do my work. Since ELAN is java-based it was a no-brainer to use Eclipse. Once I had imported the ELAN codebase into Eclipse, I set to work figuring out the necessary compilation options and linking the video libraries into the resulting jar. However, I couldn't get the video libraries to work properly and banged my head against the wall for the rest of the week. I gave up and posted on the MPI forums asking for help. The link to the forum is: Compiling ELAN for linux/windows and we talked about how outdated the Java Media Framework is. It seems like a bigger problem than I thought so I decided to not work on it further as my main goal for this internship is to improve the searching/statistical functions. Finally, I talked with the rest of the animators on the team to discuss their usage of the underlying data in order to better understand what I was supposed to do.