So the past few days have been going a lot better than the first day. Though I’m still adjusting, I’m used to things and after a phone call home, I got over being homesick. I have never been homesick ever in my life and I’m glad that I got over it so quickly cause frankly, it was not fun at all. I have not been that miserable in quite some time.
On Friday I had my first real day of working. Since my full team isn’t here yet and the rest of the lab is preparing for the site visit (where they are showing that they should get this $20 mil. Grant), they are just having me add to an already existing project. So the project I am working on is called an emotion mirror. The people on my team have created a program for the computer that through use of a webcam, it can detect someone’s face and the muscles that are being used. So then with this software, they have it connected to flash and with some fancy coding, basically whatever your face is doing, the character in flash can mirror your facial expression. The people in my lab are SO crazy smart, I’m amazed by the things they are doing (as this is not the sole thing they are working on). So anyways, with this emotion mirror, all they have right now is a pretty simple smilely face so I’m creating a few more characters to work with this program to make it more appealing. When my full team gets here though, we will be designing games to help kids with autism learn to understand emotions (which the emotion mirror is also tied to). So that will be my primary focus for the summer.
Another the thing the lab I work in is that they are building these things called learning robots. I don’t understand them fully yet, but basically when the start with them, they basically are like babies and so they are working on teaching the robots to do various things, such as sit up or follow someone’s hand. I have only seen video of these things, but I can’t wait to see them in real life. If I can take video/pictures and get permission to post, I’ll try to do so if I get the opportunity to do so.
Oh and if you’re interested, here’s the link to where I’m interning this summer, they are really doing some amazing stuff: http://mplab.ucsd.edu/wordpress
Today’s been good so far, went to a talk my aunt was the keynote speaker at and then she showed me more of San Diego, I really wish we always had 3-day weekends, there’s so many things I want to do that are all-day excursions. My aunt and I stopped by a street fair to eat lunch which was pretty fun. Otherwise, just chilling and enjoying the beautiful weather we are having today.
~Lauren
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