Friday, July 29, 2016

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.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

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.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

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---

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

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.

Monday, July 25, 2016

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.

Friday, July 22, 2016

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.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

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.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

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.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

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.

Monday, July 18, 2016

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...

Friday, July 15, 2016

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.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

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.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

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!

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

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.

Monday, July 11, 2016

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.

Friday, July 8, 2016

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.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

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.