8/17

Final day! Presentation! Finished! Yay!

So as you can read, I did the presentation today, and it went well. I tried to keep my voice very calm, and hopefully, it was.

This internship has been a very interesting experience, and I learned a lot - not only about dealing and communicating with people, but also a lot about Python.

I would like to thank Joe Pow and Bob Callens for giving me the opportunity to be in this internship. And if the other interns are actually reading this (probably not), then I wish you all a good rest of the summer!

8/16

Today my group made a lot of refinements to our presentation. I'm really glad we did a lot of practice. I saw myself improve and become less "stuttery"  along the way.

Tomorrow is the the big day: final presentation.

I can't wait for my presentation to come an end.

8/15

Today I practiced the presentation some more.

The interns came together to have some more peer review and practice.

Our presentations are all getting better.

And that's about it.

8/12

Yesterday (today is Saturday) Maria and I continued working on the presentation. I'm having trouble getting my thoughts through, and I felt really frustrated that I couldn't be concise and clear without my notes. Practice practice practice.

We also spent a lot of time trying to get some videos on our PowerPoint, but we got it in the end.

Then 2:00 came. It was peer review time. And I think I didn't do that well. I really need to practice.

So Maria, Emily (she helped us), and I stayed until 6:30-ish to work on the presentation, and we still need a lot of work.

8/11

Today I wrote scripts for the presentation and practiced saying them.

The interns got together and presented to each other for peer review. I still need a lot of practice.

Drinking hot chocolate now and burning my tongue.

8/10

Today I assigned different slides to my group to work on for the presentation. I have to practice my slides...a lot. I'm not very good at public speaking, so yeah...

I also listened to Dr. Easton's talk today about document restoration. I found it interesting...and long.

...My blogs are getting shorter, aren't they?

8/9

Today I continued on with the presentation and then took a break to learn a bit of calculus.

I'm hoping I can catch Jeff tomorrow to get some videos of the eye into the presentation.

It was fun to prove the derivative of ln(x) (which is (1/x)).

8/8

Today I put some pictures on the PowerPoint and checked how long the presentation would take. It seems we might have enough material.

Then we went to work on the AOIs and decided not to do the AOI for one of the participants because we only have one week left until the presentation.

My throat also kinda hurts right now since I ate a lot of pretzels today.

8/5

I came in early today because of some transportation situations (I arrived around 7:25) and went to the undergraduate breakfast with Maria, Emily, and Niels.

Then I went to listened to some talks. The first talk I went to was something about business, though it was hard to follow since the undergraduate basically read off his PowerPoint that didn't really explain what he was trying to say all too well. But, I suppose it was geared more towards people who actually knew about business, so it makes sense I didn't know what he was trying to say.

The next talk I went to was better. It was more structured and actually told us what the objective of his presentation was. The quick summary of his presentation is that he was trying to find an alloy of silver that would be the toughest and strongest to suit his purposes.

The last talk I went to ended as soon as I entered and sat down. It was literally five minutes, and I was late because the previous one ended a little later. So I didn't get to really hear anything for the third one.

Then I went back to the reading room and worked on the abstract, and later, the AOIs. Then, it was lunch time. By that time, I wasn't feeling too well and when we got to the lunch room, I was seeing white. I walk around for a bit and ran into a wall. Sitting down, I tried looking around, but I couldn't see anything, my vision was all white. Everything was white. So some people came and made sure I was okay and diagnosed it was just dehydration. And Emily was there carrying my lunch with a big cookie in it. I really wanted that cookie.

Eventually, I got to sit in a police car and go back to the imaging science building and ate the cookie. Then my mom picked me up and I went home.

Thanks to Joe Pow, Bob Callens, Emily, and Maria for being there with me.

The cookie was good.

8/4

Today Maria and I finished the note part of the presentation (not including the results). Now we just have to finish the AOIs and get the data to get the results. Also, we refined the abstract and are going to share them with Gabe and Susan for feedback.

After a meeting with Gabe to update him on what we're doing (we also got to see some cool visual reality stuff), I went to work on the AOIs. I am also planning to work on learning some Python when I get home since this internship is a learning experience.

I also scared Emily today. I was walking and saw her, though she didn't see me. I slowly took steps nearer to her, bent down, and next to her ear, I whispered: "hi". She jumped a little.

8/3

Today was a blur to me since I had a headache for most of the day. I'll do the list again:
1.) Worked on presentation
2.) Worked on AOI
3.) Ate pizza for lunch
4.) Listened to a talk about a lake in Africa. It was interesting how so many fields came together: the elevation of the lake (geography), its history (earth science), how lava flow disrupts the biodiversity of the lake while killing off a lot of people by releasing a massive amount of CO2  from the bottom of the lake (biology and chemistry, respectively), how we could take advantage of the released gases by converting them into energy(energy), and so on.
5.) Went back to working on the presentation.
6.) Went to take part in an experiment, but had to reschedule it for tomorrow.
7.) Met with Susan and talked about what we should include and exclude from our presentation.
8.) Met with Gabe and planned to meet again tomorrow to update him on what we're doing.
9.) Had hot chocolate.
10.) Watched movie.

And finally brought home the sausages from last Friday.

8/2

Today I started working on the PowerPoint for the final presentation. First, I made a very broad skeleton based on the outline (see Maria's blog) that we made. Then, I made notes on the second slide (the first slide is just a title slide) on what we would say during the presentation. Three paragraphs (not very long ones) took a very long time. This was since I wrote the general idea of what I wanted to say, rewrote it so that it wasn't awkward to speak (since formal writing doesn't fit with formal talking), rewrote it so that it flowed better with how I spoke, rewrote it so that it was concise and easy to follow, rewrote it, and rewrote it so many times for each and every paragraph. Basically, I rewrote the paragraphs a lot. And I still want to rewrite them and change the order of some paragraphs. The purpose of this is so that the presentation flows with minimal confusions.

I also, if you didn't notice, stopped working on Python since it would be a better use of time to do other things instead of learning all the code that is required to create the virtual gallery we would be using for our experiment when Nate already knows how to do it. I realize the point of this internship is to learn new things, but because we still have to interpret the data that we still have to filter through, do another part of the experiment, and interpret the data from that part of the experiment, we don't have a lot of time on our hands. And even with the things we are doing, that is a learning experience in itself. So instead, we decided that Nate will make the gallery while Maria continue on the AOIs while I work on the presentation.

8/1

Today I continued with Python.

And that's it.

7/29

To see the outline, go to Maria's blog.

Today I worked on learning Python the whole day. I didn't get much done today since I was very confused with the tutorial. So eventually I realized I still had the site that I initially searched up - a site that was geared more towards beginners. But still, I kept getting sidetracked with looking up other coding language.

Other than Python, I participated in an experiment today. For the experiment, I looked at dots.

The lunch today was good: I ate three plates of pickle chips.

7/28

Today the interns went to museum. It was a museum about photography and cameras. After the museum, we went to a place where we ate subs.

Then, we came back. I continued on the Python tutorial. I'm really confused on the "for-in" thing on it though.

The point of doing Python is to let us code the virtual reality gallery for our experiment.

And that's it.

7/27

Today was a lot of fun. I worked on Python, a coding language, for the entire day. I also got introduced to functions on Python by Nate. I had a bit of a roadblock at one point, but then I realized that the function will not run unless you write out the function name in a different line. I wasn't enough to just define the function. Now that I think about it, a function is just like a math equation, sometimes with words.

I also learned some of the code from Code Academy and other websites.

Ahhh--- Math is so much fun---

7/26

Today I worked on the AOIs again, and I'm still on the 5th person. I never really specified what the AOIs are for, so I'll do that now: it's like a filter that lets us see only that data inside the area we are interested in - in our case, the areas are the paintings the interns were looking at.

Sometime in the afternoon, my group went to Gabe. He wasn't present. Instead a student was there in his place. We then downloaded Python, a coding program, and then were taught some simple things we could do on it (such as using variables).

One last thing: when we were taking a break, I was telling Maria a story with my small imagination. It was a story about a son who wanted to avenged the murder of his mother. So he had to kill his father. But, in the end, the father killed the son and revealed that it was the son who killed the mother.  I thought it was a great plot twist. Maria thought ohterwise.

7/25

Today I continued working on the AOIs. By the end of the day, we finished 4 four people and an "outline" of the 5th person. So including the 5th person, we have two more people to go. But, alas, those two people looked at the gallery the longest. Haah...

Anyways, while I was working on the AOIs, Maria (with a bit of my help) worked on analyzing the data that is currently available (we don't have all the data until we finish the AOIs). We did some 1-proportion z-test, 2-sample t-test, linear regressions, et cetera (for the tests, we used a 5% significance level). One result we found was pretty surprising: with a P-Value of .0134, we were able to have convincing evidence that the true proportion of people who likes the painting that best fits their mood is greater than (1/12) (which is the expected proportion when choosing at pictures random).

And someone took my plastic box that I brought my in today. Ah well, I just hope it's back there tomorrow.

7/22

Today was a rather uneventful day. Nate and I (Maria has gone to a wedding) were working on processing our data for our experiment (me continuong the AOIs) when we got kicked out of the room since someone had to do an experiment. Unfortunately, the tools to process our data was only in that room, so we couldn't really do anything. Thus, I started working on a calculus book I brought.

Then there was lunch. It was good.

And so we went back to check if the experiment was done. It was not. I continued doing calculus. And that was basically the day.

Sometime during the day, I went to ask Emily how important were knowing the trigonometric derivatives for calculus. I suck at memorizing, so I hoped she would say it wasn't very important. She said it was very important.

7/21

Today was a blur of events. ...I feel like listing them today:
1.) Morning meeting. I confirmed to bring hamburger (not hotdog) buns.
2.) Continued getting experiment data.
3.) Went to lunch with all the interns to union place. I brought lunch (a muffin) and then bought french fries.
4.) Went back to the AOIs.
5.) Went to professor Nate to talk about mathematical modeling.
6.) Went back to work on the AOIs.
7.) Went home.

Maria and I finished another person today. About a third of the way through the third person. Nate (not the professor) worked on some code that can make our process quicker.

And that's it. The blueberry muffin looked like a lot in the morning, so I didn't pack anything else (plus I was just grabbing something from the refrigerator). Luckily, I had money with me to buy some fries.

7/20

Today I came in super early (7:45 AM) because of transportation stuff. So I continued to work on the AOI from yesterday. Then, there was the morning meeting. I'm going to bring buns again for the grill.

Then, we went to continue getting data for our experiment. After that, we ate pizza and listened to a talk about machine vision. Then we went back to work on the AOIs.

And that was the rest of the day. I finally finished one person!!! 5 to go...

While we were working on the the AOIs, I forced my group to listen to my music. They didn't like it, but that's okay because I didn't like theirs either.

7/19

Today was a pretty repetitious day. After completing part of the experiment, we went to lunch. I ate two delicate pork buns this time. And I also had some oreo-balls Madi made. They were good.

After lunch, my group went back to work. Maria and I were creating areas of interest (AOI) on the mobile eye tracker information - and although twining some parts simplified the process a lot, creating the AOIs still takes a long time.

Near the end of the day, I thought I was on the last part of creating AOIs for that single person, but the person went back to different parts of the experiment. I couldn't stay longer since my mom picks me up with my brother, so I couldn't finish the AOIs for that one person. Aghhh. I thought I completed something today. There's still so much to do. Cheers.

7/18

Today we finished setting up the experiment. After doing a couple dry runs, we got a few interns to do the experiment (Emily, Madi, and Zi Hao). Since I don't want the rest to know about the experiment procedures, I'll stop the blog here.

One more thing: I had a delicacy of having a small pork bun today. Now I'm hungry. And still waiting for my ramen noodles...

7/15

Today was much more productive than yesterday. After the mornig meeting, my group started setting up another part of the experiment environment. We didn't get to set it up completely since we needed some more material, In the meantime, we also did a test run of the experiment with the eye tracker. I had a little trouble calibrating at first, but after discovering a few tricks to make rhe calibration morw accurate, it was easier.

After that, my group met up with the rest of the interns at the grill. I didn't bring anything this time since I brought 16 buns last time (by the way, I didn't bring the extra buns home until this Wednesday). Anyways, we ate hot dogs - though I just ate the meat part with ketchup - brownies, chips, and ice cream. It wasn't raining as much today, so we got to play volleyball a bit more. The volleyball was harder then I had expected, so it usually hit the net whenever I attempted to touch it.

Then we went back to work. After getting the data from the test run, my group used BeGaze (a program) to look at some areas of interest (we were twining some areas of interest together to save a lot of time).

By the end of the day, I went to the refrigerator to get my lunch container (a plastic box). But then I realized that I didn't bring a lunch - the refrigerator was empty.

7/14

Today was very slow. After completing the abstract (see Nate's blog), we went further in refining the details of our experiment. We weren't able to start using the interns for the experiment yet because of some conflicting schedules.

We also went on scholar.google.com to check out previous experiments and conclusions, but we didn't go too deep.

In between, all the interns went to Global City (or was it village???) and got lunch there. But, I brought my lunch instead since I didn't want to pay for food.

Oh yea, I ate a total of three donuts today: one for lunch and two right before I left.

7/13

Today all the interns met in the reading room and planned the cook out for Friday.

Then we went off into our groups. My group materialized the plans we were outlining yesterday for the experiment. I had a little trouble organizing part of the experiment, but it worked out in the end - hopefully (I'm not going to say what it was because I know you other interns are reading, so I'll keep the experiment secret from you test subjects).

In between the materializing, us interns went to a talk by professor Jeff. I think the main reason most of us went was because of the free pizza. Anyways, Jeff's talk had to be a bit rushed since we started out late. Nevertheless, it was interesting in that it was both familiar (from boot camp) and new material.

And that's basically what I did today.

By the way, I'm typing on my new and very first phone; I think my typing speed skills are improving. Level up!

7/12

Today we went further with designing the experiment. But, before we continued with the design, we talked to professor Jeff about the binary system. Jeff answers questions with really long answers, but I like it since his explanation is good.

After Jeff answered our (me and Maria's) questions, we (me, Maria, and Nate) were transferred to Susan. We decided that we would use the large art gallery for the experiment. Then, we discussed how the experiment was going to happen: what materials we need, what questions we would ask, what order we would ask the questions, how we would randomize some of the experiment, et cetera.

Sometime in between, we were transferred to Elena and simulated some of what we would do in one part of the experiment.

Basically, we spent most of the day simulating and designing how our experiment would be done.

And there was a fire drill today (there was one yesterday too).

...I almost lost this post and almost had to type this again. Thanks to Emily for getting this blog back. Cheers.

7/11

Today we switched from boot camp to discussing about the set-up of the experiment we are going to do. The goal of the experiment is to determine the differences in the eye movement pattern between artists and non-artists when viewing art. Not every point of the experiment is set yet, but we did determine which pictures we want people (we're going to use the other interns for our sample) to look at. A couple technologies we are going to use for the experiment are an eye tracker and a software for determining where the eyes are going to look.

After looking at the technologies we are most likely going to use for the experiment, we then went to a student presentation. The presentation was about how the student did an experiment in determining what colors have the greatest salience (the ability to capture the eyes' attention).

Fun fact: I learned the binary system today. 57 (which is 32 + 16 + 8 + 1) in binary language is 111001.

7/8

Today was the the first day we had a cookout! Cookouts are every Friday, and we - the interns - had all brought something for us to eat (I brought buns). The ketchup was some kind of chunky ketchup I've never seen before, but it tasted good nevertheless. There were some extras left over; there was just a lot of food!

In my group today, we read and discussed articles and research papers we interns had picked out - I had originally chosen an article pertaining saccadic movements and decision making. I thought it was interesting, but I switched to a different article that interested me more. The second article I picked was about the relationship between gaming and visual and cognitive abilities (for example, visual acuity and mental focus). Surprisingly, video games actually improves visual and cognitive skills rather than being useless or even deteriorating such abilities. But, not all games are able improve such skills. The genre that is more likely to improve the abilities is action games rather than social games; this isn't very surprising, though, since action games are usually more intense than social games.

And I forgot to bring the extra buns home.

7/7

Today my group continued boot camp. First, we met went to the V.R. (Visual Reality) Lab, and talked with a different person. Then, we went back to boot camp and we reviewed what we learned yesterday. After reviewing, we continued on with boot camp and talked about a new method in eye tracking that addressed some of the problems that made things more difficult in previous models of eye trackers.The new method is pretty useful. Then, we - Maria, Nate and I - got our eyes scanned out by a machine. Meanwhile (since we could only scan our eyes one at a time), each of use were looking for an article that interested us (provided that it was related to the eye) using scholar.google.com. I got an article about how saccades are related to decision making. It'll be interesting.

7/6

It an interesting first day of the internship.

The first thing we did was go to the red barn. We played some games there and, overall, we learned that the key to success was communication.

Then we went to lunch (which was free - yay).

After lunch, we interns got split up to different groups. I was grouped with two others: Maria and Nate. The adviser's name was Jeff. The first day in our group was boot camp, which was basically us learning about a lot of things that deals with the eye. The first thing we did in boot camp was look at optical illusions - which are really neural illusions. Then, we talked about the different parts of the eye (the cornea, fovea, retina, cones, rods, muscles rotating the eye, et cetera). During this talk of eye anatomy, we also talked about optics - which was a small portion of my physics course, so I had some background knowledge. After talking about the anatomy of the eye, we talked about different types of eye movements (for example, a saccade is kind of like a bullet). Finally, we ended with the discussion of the history of studying eyes. Luckily, we aren't in a time period where we need to put cocaine in our eyes just to study it - we've gotten more digital now.

By the end of the day, I was exhausted  (actually, I was exhausted after lunch). Nevertheless, it was a fun day.