7/30/13

Today was a very productive day! It just flew by which is extremely exciting! We learned how to video edit and record youtube videos using the mac! Also, we got to talk to Jeff 3 times today! That is a big accomplishment! So basically we worked on the videos today. However, we are only half way done....but we are on a time crunch. Since, Jeff and Susan are really busy and we are not here on Friday. So, we have to finish and get our experiment approved for next week since both Susan and Jeff won't be here.

7/29/13

I came in all excited about the research idea but sadly Jeff was no where to be found! So, Mia and I tried to do as much as we could without him. We outlined our idea, made an abstract, and looked for youtube videos to use in our experiment. Let's just say that took up most of our day because it is very hard to choose a good youtube video for our experiment. Hopefully, the videos we find are approved! I think we have narrowed it down to 2 videos which is exactly what we need. Tomorrow, we should find Jeff!

7/26/13

So, today was an exciting day! We finally talked to Jeff and got an experiment idea finalized. All thanks to Glen for his clever idea. We were thrilled that we got step 1 accomplished. After lunch, Jeff assigned us to each read 4 articles on our research topic. Thus, we spent time looking for articles and dividing them up between Mia and I. That's about what I did today because I had to leave early once again. It was an accomplished day

7/25/13

Our favorite agenda of the day.... Brainstorming! As usual, we spent the morning brainstorming and we also tested another subject. Afterwards, we went around with our survey and achieved a little bit of our goal with the survey! That is exciting. We also learned how to set up the experiment in BeGaze in order for it to be exported to a txt file that will later be converted into an excel file. I gotta say its a little tedious but much better than the wearable eye tracker. We also wanted feedback from Jeff about our research ideas. But, as usual we cannot find him as of now. Hopefully, we can talk to him today or tomorrow at the latest because we want to actually start up on the experiment designing next week which will be fun and interesting!

7/24/13

It started out as a slow day but got better! Mia and I brainstormed(once again) and this time I actually kinda like my idea which is exciting! We also conducted our experiment on three other subjects today! The only new thing today was that we made a survey to give around the building for our experiment. That was fun and awkward at the same time! Cuz we have the "high school interns" reputation. I got my laptop finally but it was having problems, so now they have to fix it:( O and since today was Wednesday we got our usual pizza and soda.

7/23/13

We finally had people come into the lab today!!! We talked to Susan about our research ideas, she liked them! However, I am not happy with my idea. So, I am going to write an abstract for my current idea and then hopefully change it to something better by the end of the week. Mia, Sara, and I went to the Graduate Symposium in the afternoon today. It was interesting because we could actually follow some of them. I think for the most part they were interesting. We also got Ice Cream at the Symposium! Also, we got cake for Dong's Birthday! It was a really good Ice Cream Cake that Preethi made. Today, was fun. I hope to get an idea finalized by the end of the week and finish the current experiment by Friday. Hopefully, everything goes as planned.

7/22/13

Today was a pretty slow day... No one showed up today:( It was just Mia and I in the lab. So, we researched our ideas a little bit more and wanted to run them by Jeff and Susan because we needed to get the ideas approved for our abstract that is due Wednesday but that did not happen since no one was here today. We finally talked to Preethi about what we could do because we ran out of things to do. She showed the wearable eye trackers and how to use them. They are much cooler than the SMI's! We played around with them and had Sara walk around the building with it on. Afterwards, Robert came in to do his experiment. Lastly, we finally got introduced to Yarbus! The fun application that goes with the wearable eye-trackers! It is a little tedious with clicking the points on the pupil and cornea but I thought it was exciting. Unfortunately, the video was bad accordingly to Yarbus. Thus, we could not calibrate it properly. That is our task for tomorrow!

7/19/13

We got a lot of work done today! We first did a test-run of our experiment on Jeff with Susan watching us for feedback! The feedback allowed us to make some changes to our directions and question sheet. This basically took up the whole morning. Afterwards, we went our BBQ! It was honestly too hot to do anything outside. When we came back from lunch we prepared our experiment for Sara and worked on a revised t-shirt design since we can't use Phineas and Ferb on our T-shirts! We were able to conduct our experiment on 3 interns today. It was really interesting and fun to actually run the experiment today! I look forward to continuing on the experiment. I really hope the results show that the hypothesis is true! Unfortunately, we could only perform the experiment on 3 people since I had to leave early because I'm going to Virginia and Washington D.C. for the weekend! I'm excited except for the 10 hour car ride....

7/18/13

As soon as I came in today, I worked on my Excel sheets. Afterwards, I spent a lot of time researching the project I want to do! I looked on Google for ideas but it did not really help. Thus, I asked Bethany about the previous interns. That really helped me understand the types of projects I am suppose to do. I also looked for ideas on the RIT Library Site. That was actually helpful! In addition, I played around with the SMI trackers a little more because practice makes perfect! I think I know how to use the tracker for the most part and how to analysis it in BeGaze but the real test will be tomorrow when we do some trial runs before the actual experiment starts! O and I won Uno today at lunch:)  I really am hoping I get the a laptop soon with Matlab on it. That way I can get familiar with the program in my down time and learning it now will help me finish my project sooner in August.  Hopefully, tomorrow will be more exciting because Susan said she will have more time for us tomorrow.

7/17/13

Today is my birthday! I brought in cupcakes for everyone and Bob and Bethany bought doughnuts for us! We ate a lot of junk food today.... Today we did a lot of research on our experiments that we will be executing later on this summer. But it's really hard to think of ideas. Especially, when there are no guidelines for the experiment. Also, Mia and I worked on a t-shirt design. I personally like it! It has Perry the Platypus on it:) We also worked on the Excel sheets today. Lastly, we worked with Susan on the experiment we will be working on next week. We finished the observer sheet, instructions, and made the permission slips to hand out to the participants. Today was a relaxing day in a way....

7/16/13

Today was a lot of fun! It was a lot of information to absorb in one day but I honestly learned a lot. Surprisingly, I didn't feel like it was a slow and boring day! We have been learning from 9 A.M to around 3 P.M. But, time flew by! I was so excited that I started learning the information the night before. Plus, Susan and Jeff bought lunch for us which was nice of them. I learned a lot  about the structure of the eye, the different eye movements, and the different eye trackers. I thought it was really interesting that  we perceive and process images differently than we think. Also, we learned that even though we think our eye is stable, it really is not. In fact, it's always moving around! After a fun day of learning, we worked with the remote eye-trackers in the lab next door. We conducted a test run of the experiment that we will be conducting later in the summer on real test subjects. Also, we took the data and tried to analyze it in the BeGaze. Today was a lot of fun and I can't wait until we execute this experiment on actual subjects soon!

7/15/13

I came in late today but we continued to work on excel and learned a little more about the eyetrackers. I finished around 50 files, maybe! That is a huge accomplishment especially since I came in late today. No one was in the lab today. Only Libby and Jeff showed up around 3 in the afternoon. Otherwise, we were alone in the lab all day today! But, I am very excited for the Bootcamp that starts Tuesday!

7/12/13

Excel, excel, and excel was all I did today. I tried to finish as many as I could because I felt bad that we may be slowing down the Libby's work instead of helping him out. I work efficiently and finished many of the excel documents. Sadly, I missed the first of the many intern barbecues because I had to go somewhere. Hopefully, I will make it to next Friday's BBQ! It's officially the end of my first week here and I got to say I love everyone that I work with and I can already tell I'm going to learn a lot this summer! Especially, with the qusestion of the day we have everyday and the occasional brain teasers:)

7/11/13

Sorry! I didn't have time to post on the 11th But it was a frustrating day. We spent hours working on a problem in Matlab. We finally had to ask for help. I wish I had this application at home, so I could learn the program better and become more familiar with it. After lunch, we decided to take a break and work in excel which is in our comfort zone. Afterwards, we got to look at the eye tracking device and play around with it. We realized I'm a difficult person to eye track! Well, that was pretty much my day....

7/10/13

Today was more on the boring side. We fixed various issues throughout the day and once again ended with a major issue with our programming in Matlab that we will have to deal with tomorrow. In short, we finished and plotted the raw data in Matlab and we started on our events data but ran into problems with graphing the duration overlapped on the elapsed as the x value and two y values. We will see how that goes tomorrow. We also got a nice opportunity to watch some Tedtalks videos on new technology that is developing rapidly. One of the videos dealt with helping the blind see with these UV glasses that had a camera in it. That was pretty much my day today!

7/9/13

Today was a pretty productive day. We worked in excel and learned how to use a new program called Matlab. There is a lot of codes to use and it difficult to understand. We went through the process of using this program to graph data. It was pretty frustrating at first to work with the program. However, we finally understood the program at the end of the day! Now that I have got the hang of it, I want experiment more in this program tomorrow!

First Day

Hi everybody! My name is Simran Marwah and this summer I am interning at the RIT college of imaging science. In particular, I will be spending time in the visual perception lab along with another intern!



The first day was a lot of fun! We got to know our team of interns really well. We started off with a video scavenger hunt around the campus! It was a long and tiring scavenger hunt...it was about 3ish hours long. Our group did really well, we found around 20 items out of 36 and we won the overall competition. Afterwards, I got a tour of the Visual Perception Lab. Our supervisor will be out this week. Thus, we are working on data analysis for a graduate's experiment that is really unique and interesting. I can't wait until tomorrow.