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My summer lab at NASA GSFC included a high school media team, who continuously had the rest of us on film. They compiled a great documentary describing the two main projects going on in the lab — the Greenland ROVER and Lidar-Assisted Robotic Group Exploration:

Engineering Boot Camp Documentary 2011

There are some other videos up now, too — click over to the GSFC robotics youtube channel; there are more than I’m linking here:

GROVER on the beach: The Greenland ROVER during a test run on the beach, during our trip to Wallops.

LIDAR image test: Watch a 360-degree image from the LIDAR sensor on one of my team’s robots as it’s formed.

I encourage you to take a look!

Don’t ever stop

This one’s a life update post, but it’s also a “here’s some cool science!” post.

A few days ago, I graduated from Vassar College with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science and a correlate in Computer Science. I was decorated with general honors, departmental honors, membership to Psi Chi, and membership to Sigma Xi. My time there was awesome.

What’s next?

No lazy summer!

Well, no lazy summer break for me! I’ve already spent three days in my summer lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where I’ll be working on a number of software development projects. The primary one is a LIDAR-assisted robotic group exploration project, in which we’re going to have a small fleet of robots — a mothership and some workerbots — use 3D LIDAR data to autonomously map and plot paths through an area. This kind of robot fleet could, eventually, be used to explore other planets. One of the big challenges will be dealing with the 3D image data. I’m looking forward to learning more image processing algorithms!

Another project is the redesign of the Greenland Robotic Vehicle, a big autonomous rover that’ll drive across Greenland, collecting a data about snowfall, mapping, and exploring. Did you know there’s ice on that country two miles thick? I may also get to play with a robot that has stereo vision.

You can see some of these robots (and what life in the lab may be like) in this great video about last year’s interns.

So far, I’ve met a bunch of intelligent, friendly folks, started catching up on already-written code, and begun to delve into the platforms, libraries, and algorithms we’ll be using and developing this summer. Our mentors have already proven themselves to be enthusiastic and helpful. Just yesterday, one of them told us,

“You’re engineers at NASA. You want to go where things are, and then go beyond.”

That may end up being our theme for the summer.

A little overwhelming?

There’s going to be so much going on. It’d be easy to get overwhelmed — especially now, jumping in and floundering around in the code, the projects, the people. So much to learn.

But as I sat in the lab today, reading about ROS, going through tutorials, reading about PCL and feature detection in point clouds, digging through last summer’s confusing pile of C# and C++ programs, I realized I wasn’t overwhelmed. And it was because of all the other experiences I’ve had that’ve gotten me to this point.

Confidence. My first URSI summer, flailing through Microsoft Robotics Studio and complicated conceptual theories. Figuring out how to deal with webcams and image data my second URSI summer, reading papers on optical flow and implementing algorithms. Last summer: excavations of an open source flight simulator, the Aeronautics Student Forum, dealing with different work styles and communication styles in my LARSS lab. And more.

I think about all those experiences, and I’m not afraid of this summer. I could almost be overwhelmed — perhaps thinking that everyone else has more of the right kind of experience; I wasn’t trained as a classic engineer — but I know I can succeed. My non-engineering, cognitive science background sets me apart and lets me look at problems a little differently than everyone else. I’m an asset.

I know how to learn. I know how to do research.

I can conquer this summer.

Summer plans

My first post-graduation plans have been finalized: I’ll be returning to the fine world of software development and robotics for a summer internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I’ll be working with a diverse bunch of engineers and interns on what I expect will be super exciting, super cool projects.

Thesis!

On Friday, I turned in my undergraduate cognitive science thesis. It’s been a year in the making — I started brainstorming ideas last April, spent all summer reading up on relevant literature, and all of this school year developing my model, programming the simulation, running experiments, and finally, writing about all of that.

It’s a little weird to realize that I don’t have to constantly be thinking about this project any more. I don’t have to be, but ever since handing it in, my thoughts continue to swirl around what further analyses to do on the data I collected, how to fix up the studies I did to get more powerful results, which studies would make sense as the next step…

Here’s the abstract:

A biologically inspired predator-prey study of the effects of emotion and communication on emergent group behavior

Any agent that functions successfully in a constantly changing world must be able to adapt its behavior to its current situation. In biological organisms, emotion is often highlighted as a crucial system for generating adaptive behavior. This paper presents a biologically-inspired predator-prey model to investigate the effectiveness of an emotion-like system in guiding the behavior of artificial agents, implemented in a set of simulated robots. The predator’s behavior was governed by a simple subsumption hierarchy; the prey selected actions based on direct sensory perceptions dynamically integrated with information about past motivational/emotional states. Aspects of the prey’s emotion system were evolved over time. The first study examined the interactions of a single prey with the predator, indicating that having an emotion system can led to more diverse behavioral patterns, but may not lead to optimal action selection strategies. In the second study, groups of prey agents were evolved. These agents began to utilize alarm signaling and displayed fear contagion, with more group members surviving than in groups of emotionless prey. These results point to the pivotal role emotion plays in social scenarios. The model adds to a critical body of research in which important aspects of biological emotion are incorporated into the action selection mechanisms of artificial agents to achieve more adaptive, context-dependent behavior.

A comprehensive Cognitive Science and Computer Science internship resource list

As my undergrad years draw to a close, I’ve compiled a list of internships and related opportunities for students in Cognitive Science and Computer Science. Most programs are also open to students in other engineering and technology fields and are not limited to undergraduate students!

Take a look! Pass along the page to anyone you know who may find it useful. Although deadlines for some summer 2011 programs have passed, many have March or April deadlines, and many of the semester or year-round programs have later deadlines.

A new semester…

Long time, no writing — it’s the start of a new semester (my last semester!) and I’ve been busy with a number of different things:

1. The VC Women’s Fencing team. We’re in full competition mode. We conquered in Cleveland recently, vanquished difficult foes at Brown University, and are gearing up for a big match at Wellesley next Sunday, which will decide whether we claim the Northeast Conference Championship this year!
2. My undergraduate cognitive science thesis. I’m looking at the emergent behavior of a group of simulated prey robots that can communicate with each other about the presence of a predator. I have questions about communication, environment, and motivation. Being a year-long project, I’m supposedly halfway through, though in reality, it’s not so clear-cut. I spent all summer reading papers and doing background research, filled last semester with hypotheses, possible architectures, and more background research, wrote up a first draft this winter break, and am now hard at work on the simulation itself.
3. Taking photos of the weather. An unusually large amount of snow has fallen at Vassar — what better to do than document it with a camera? (Click for larger versions.)


Sunset Lake II



Snow Forest



Winter Picnic

4. Figuring out my post-graduation life. On the advice of many folks, I’m not heading immediately to grad school. My enthusiasm for learning, research, and knowledge hasn’t vanished — quite the contrary. I’m going to spend at least a year exploring the places outside the classroom, longer depending on where I end up. Academia-land? The wide world beyond? Still up in the air.

Genes: predictor of academic ability?

I found an article today about British researchers who are analyzing the DNA of 4000+ schoolchildren with the goal of finding a relation between the kids’ genes and their academic abilities.

The reason I bring this up is not because the researchers found a gene to explain why you failed your math test, but because the article falls heavily into the “nature vs. nurture” trap. For those of you unfamiliar, nature vs. nurture is the debate over the relative importance of innate qualities built-in from the chromosomes (“nature”), versus personal experiences, environment, and upbringing (“nurture”) in determining individual physical and behavioral differences. Really, it shouldn’t be a debate: organisms’ traits are a result of the interaction of what they start with and where they grow up: nature and nurture. The context in which any organism develops is remarkably important in determining which genes are expressed and how they interact to produce behavior.

Back to the article. There’s one paragraph in particular that gets me:

“Research into height, for example, has picked out 300 genes that affect how tall people will grow, but even these genes can only explain 15% of the total variations in human height. It implies that hundreds more genes must also play a part.”

No, that’s a false choice. What’s implied is that there could be other genes involved, but – and here’s a novel thought – maybe the environment (e.g., nutrition) plays a role? A little bitsy part? Maybe?

A little googling:

In hopes that it was just the reporters who were being deterministic, not the researchers themselves, I set out to find more information.

Robert Plomin of King’s College, London, is the behavioral geneticist cited in the article. He’s currently performing a huge study of British twins. I’ve found several articles stating that he’s a “pioneer in bringing nature and nurture together,” and instead of calling it a “nature vs. nurture” debate, he’s said to have call it (much more appropriately) “nature and nurture.” That’s reassuring. I’d have to read a few of his papers to be certain, but my interim conclusion is that it’s just the reporters.

If you’re interested, I also recently came across a popular article on the gender myth and genetic differences in men and women. It happens to cite Robert Plomin, too.

I collected up all the articles, blog posts, and cool videos about my LARSS summer into one nice, neat page. There’s new material there – I’ve included our project abstract as well as videos of flying quadcopters!

Check it out.

You know you want to.