Caltech

Last Thoughts

Hey guys, it’s been really fun telling you all about my SURF, but all good things must come to an end.

Yesterday, I got a call from a professor at Johns Hopkins who wanted to talk about my grad school application. He was very interested in this SURF project and asked me a lot of questions about it. I think he was impressed.

Next week, I have an interview with Oracle. They were also impressed with my resume. They’re going to fly me there and put me up overnight, so that’s really cool.These are only the tip of the iceberg. I’m going to spend the next month running around doing interviews. I credit my SURF work. I think it really strengthened my resume in a way that is not available at a lot of other colleges. Of course, cool classes like CS 144 can't hurt!

I have been very happy with my SURF experience. I've really enjoyed the work and I think it's been very educational. I would highly recommend it to any student or prospective student.

Bye!

Presentations

At the end of my SURF, we'd made quite a bit of progress. We had a working prototype which we could demonstrate!

My mentor arranged for us to present at the Smart Grid Symposium, which was sponsored by Southern California Edison. They were interested in our work because they would like to be able to protect the electric grid in the event of an earthquake.

My mentor was one of the keynote speakers. In the middle of his presentation, he stopped and told everybody to make sure to check out our poster. I was so happy!

Our poster was a little big for their easels, so it hung off the sides. We had to watch it carefully to make sure it didn't fall over!

Our presentation required three laptops. The organizers were astonished! We got our own table.

Several of the Caltech professors presented their current research. In addition to Mani Chandy (my mentor), Steven Low, Adam Weirman (who is currently running the RankManiac 2010 contest in his CS 144 class), and Andreas Krause all talked about what they were currently working on.

In addition to the SmartGrid symposium, I got to do three on-campus presentations. My mentor arranged for me to present to the Rigorous Systems Research Group, which is composed of several of the CS professors and graduate students. They asked quite a few probing questions, which kept us on our toes! They also had some good suggestions.

I got to present to the CS 9 class as well. It's a class that reviews the current Caltech CS research, intended for freshmen. I highly recommend it.

Lastly, I presented at SURF seminar day. I was really pleased to see that my sponsors, Dr. and Mrs. Kiyo (BS '40) and Eiko Tomiyasu. He graduated with a degree in EE, back in the day. It was really nice that they took the time to come and see my presentation.

Whew! That's a lot of presentations!

SURF Paper

I've mostly finished my SURF. By this, I mean that I'm no longer being paid. The thing about research projects, I've discovered, is that they never really end. You can always do more experiments, or refine your data, or go in a new and different direction. It's one of the jobs of the professor in charge to call a stop to the work once there's enough to publish.

Last year, I waited until the last minute to write my SURF Paper and presentation. As a result, they sucked. This year, I started much, much earlier. I'm already on my third draft of my paper and I'm starting to work on my PowerPoint presentation.

Making the presentation is much easier if you already have a well organized paper. A good paper is a lot like a good story. You hook the reader with a general overview, then you step the reader through the various parts of your experiment. At the end, you sum it all up and tell the reader why the stuff you just talked about is important. It's the same for the presentation, except you have to back up a little bit so that people can follow along at a glance. Nobody likes reading pages of equations in a research paper, but they will if it's important to the research. Absolutely nobody will read pages of equations in a PowerPoint presentation!

I sent my draft off to all my mentors and professors for their opinions. They had very constructive suggestions. They've suggested organizational changes, clarifications, corrections, focus changes, section expansions, and (embarrassingly) spelling corrections in their names. Now, I just have to buckle down and do it!

This year, I'm using LaTex to do all my reports and papers. It really makes them look professional. I downloaded an IEEE style file, so my paper should conform to that style.

Here's a sneak peek of my paper:

Rocking Out

The adapters that I spent so long getting were immediately put to good use. One of my friends had just bought a copy of Rock Band 2 (marked down because of the new Beatles Rock Band), somebody else had a XBox 360 we could use, we borrowed some controllers, and the house had speakers and a projector. It's a bit like stone soup, if you remember that fairy tale, but we made it work.

We projected everything up on one of the walls in the courtyard. The residents on that wall put down their blinds at night most of the time anyway, so people aren't looking in their windows, so it makes a nice screen. We had to be careful, though, to make sure the bottom of the picture was aimed at the big white space between windows. Otherwise, it's kind of hard to play.

The hardest part of setting everything up is moving the speakers. It takes two people to get them up and down the stairs, so it's kind of a pain. It's worth it, though! With those speakers, you feel like you're really rocking out!

We dragged over some couches so people would have a place to sit. Several of the new freshmen who are here for pre-season showed up and played for a while. Then, around 2 am we had to pack up. Pasadena has zoning ordinances that say that we're not supposed to make loud noises after 2 am, even on the weekend.

After that long walk, I was content to watch other people play while I relaxed in the hot tub. Ahhhh.

Getting Cables or A Tour of Pasadena

The other day, I wanted some cables. What I needed were two 1/4" Stereo Male to RCA Female adapters, so I could hook up an X-box to the house speaker system.

First, I tried several shops along Lake Avenue, but none of them knew what I was talking about. I tried Target, but they've switched to all HD stuff. Paseo (which is like a mall) didn't have anything for me either, but I got directions from their information desk to the nearest Radio Shack (turns out it wasn't the nearest at all. Oh well.). She said it wasn't walking distance, but I didn't pay much attention to that. After all, it was a nice afternoon and I didn't need to be anywhere. So, I fueled up on Jamba Juice and headed out.

She told me to go north to Orange Grove, then go east for "a while." It turns out that "a while" is a really, really long way. Oh well. I got to see a part of Pasadena I hadn't seen before.

The area directly north of Caltech is a little rough. The houses are a little run-down and some of the shops are empty. That's probably why Caltech has expanded northwards and not southwards since moving to Pasadena; million-dollar mansions to the south vs. small homes to the north. Once I started heading west, though, the houses started getting bigger and the lawns started getting greener.

I must have passed fifteen churches on my trip. They ranged from the enormous Anglican church across from the city hall to a very plain Friends Meeting in Orange Grove. I've heard people claim that Pasadena has more churches per capita than anywhere else in the U.S. It certainly seems likely after all the churches I saw!

I passed a couple parks, too. Pasadena parks are very nice. They all have free restrooms and water fountains (very convenient on a long walk). They usually have nice play equipment, too.

I passed a school with the best playground equipment I've ever seen! Everything was shaped like a dinosaur. There was a Brontosaurus with four slides for legs, a Stegosaurus jungle gym, etc. If there hadn't been a fence in the way, I would have stopped and played on it!

Eventually, I got a little lost. I had been walking along Orange Grove, but eventually it turned into a different street. Luckily, right there on the corner was a Pasadena Public library! I was a little nervous, because I'd forgotten my library card, but I asked them for directions anyway. They were very helpful. They told me to keep going until I saw a bowling alley, then a Bank of America, then an Islands. Sure enough, the Radio Shack was right where they said it would be. They got me the adapters I needed and I headed back. It was a much shorter return trip, since I knew that I could head right back to Caltech.

All in all, it was a 12 mile trip. I could have chosen a much faster route, and I certainly could have gone to a closer store, but it was an adventure!

Covered in Blood!

On Saturday, I was drenched in blood. I took three showers and it's still caked under my fingernails. My clothes are a total loss. Why was this? What happened? Am I okay? Don't worry, it was just a drill.

Caltech's security is one of the best I've seen. They take their job very seriously. They're very nice to the students and they'll let you in to a lab if you forget your keys (and can convince them you belong there!), but at the same time they're a very professional group.

As part of this, many of the members of Caltech's security force have gotten training as First Responders. Caltech covers the costs and the guy who trains them is the same guy who trained me as a Health Ad, but they still have to put in the time and effort to get the training. So, if anyone gets hurt on campus, security will help them out until an ambulance can arrive.

As part of the training, the officers have to pass a final "practicum," where they respond to a series of staged emergencies. I can't describe my emergency in detail because they might reuse the scenario, but let's just say that I was not having a good day. We had to set up tarps beforehand so the pool of blood wouldn't permanently stain the room. One of the trainers put a bunch of makeup on me, too, so I really did look like I was dying.

The officers came through and responded to my emergency. One poor guy was shaking so hard that he could barely take my pulse. He knew his stuff, though, so he did fine. That's one of the goals of the practicum, anyway, to desensitize you to all the blood so you're not so anxious on your first real emergency.

At lunch I went over to grab my mail because I was afraid that the mail office would close before we got done. I was dripping a little bit, but I wasn't worried about it. On the way there, I passed a tour group, but they didn't say a word. Somebody else asked me for directions and didn't mention my appearance at all. People are so desensitized these days. I did get stopped by a four-year-old, who asked me if I was covered in paint or blood. I told him it was paint. His dad thought the whole exchange was hilarious.

Caltech security is very professional, but they also have a sense of humor. Once, long, long ago, some British royalty came to visit Caltech. They didn't want any pictures taken of them and they brought their own security. The British security snubbed Caltech's security, so when Caltech's security found out about a plot by some students to snag a picture, they just kept quiet. Later, when a student popped up from an access panel in the middle of the Olive Walk, right in the middle of their procession, Caltech's security just laughed as the Brits freaked out. Ha!

Visiting the Sister

While I was home, my parents and I took a trip up to visit my sister at college. She's a freshman at Carnegie Mellon and she had just finished her second week of classes.

I got to see her dorm room! My parents had already seen it when she moved in, but I'd never had a chance.

She's living in Stever Hall, which she chose because it's environmentally friendly (she wants to be an environmental engineer). It earned a silver LEED certification. I helpfully pointed out that my lab got a gold certification, which is one better, but I guess it's easier to make a lab environmentally friendly than a dorm.

She's pretty excited about joining SWE (Society of Women Engineers). They're a national organization for supporting women in technical disciplines. (Caltech has an active chapter of SWE. Last year, I helped host an event with them through the Club for Computer Science. We invited some alumnae back to talk about their experiences in academia and industry. It was interesting.) Later, while we were walking around town, we stopped into a Ten Thousand Villages and found out that one of the volunteers there was also a member of SWE! Wow!

While I was there, I ran into a friend of mine from Caltech! Ashok graduated in 2008 and used to be the president of Dabney House. He's working on a Ph.D. in neural computation in the Doiron Lab as part of a joint project between CMU and U. Pitt. Pretty cool stuff. It certainly is a small world. I didn't expect to run into anybody I knew!

Traveling

I've headed home for two weeks to visit my family. It seems like a good opportunity to talk about traveling back and forth to Tech.

I live in Maryland, so it's kind of a long way for me. It's certainly nothing next to the international students, but Caltech is the furthest I've ever been from home. I can't usually get a non-stop flight, so it takes about 8 hours of flying time. With security and travel to and from the airport, I end up losing a whole day to travel. Which is to say, I spend a whole day reading a good book and napping, so it's not a total loss.

When I was a freshman, my parents were worried that I was going to be so far away. My mother used to complain that if I got sick it would take her eight hours to come and take care of me. Shockingly, this did not faze me. In fact, I looked on it as eight hours of early warning!

One of the things that made my parents feel less concerned about me was knowing that I wouldn't have to worry about transportation to and from the airport. I always use one of the shuttle services, like Supershuttle or Prime Time. I can reserve it ahead of time, and I've never had any problems with wait times or anything like that.

I always fly in and out of Burbank airport. It's a much smaller airport than LAX, so it feels less hurried. I can usually get through airport security in under ten minutes! An interesting tidbit: Burbank is the one of the last airports in the country that allows passengers to deplane from both ends of the plane. So, if you sit in the very back, people might look at you funny, but you'll be the first one out!

Years ago I knew a guy who got stopped by Burbank's security. This was after 9/11, so they had chemical detectors and everything. They had found traces of ammonium nitrate on his shoes and were concerned, since it's a component of many homemade explosives. He had the ammonium nitrate on his shoes because they were the same shoes he had been wearing to chem lab, and he must have picked up trace amounts from the lab. He was really nervous about being stopped, but he tried to explain the circumstances. When the security guards heard that he was a Caltech student, though, they just waved him through. Apparently they're used to our shenanigans!

Data!

My SURF took quite a bit of work at the beginning, getting everything working. We built our whole system from scratch, so nothing actually worked until several weeks in. Now we have a working system!

Currently, we only have one working client, a laptop in my SURF mentor's office. We have ten of the accelerometers, though, so we'll soon have more clients. The day after I installed everything for my mentor and got it running he came back with a list of improvements he wanted, so that will keep me busy!

Our server had a bit of trouble towards the end of last week. Because of the construction in Annenberg, the power was going to be switched off, so we had to shut it down overnight. Unfortunately, the only people with root access to the server were in Norway for a conference! So, we had to turn the machine back on first thing in the morning, then wait for them to finish eating dinner (since they're nine hours ahead), sign in, and set everything back to rights. Then the next day, do the same thing again! What a hassle!

No matter. The SURF students working on the server side of the project whipped up a snappy little application that puts the data received by the server onto a Google map. Now we can see it all the way from thumping on the table to showing up as a dot on the map. Very gratifying.

I have data from the experiment with the sledgehammer, too. I overlaid the data received by the professional sensor and the data received by our sensor. Our data is quite a bit worse, which is to be expected. Since our device is so small it has very little inertia and ended up bouncing around after each event, which added lots of noise to the data. Apparently, I was too close to the sensors when I was swinging the sledgehammer, so the seismic activity was not quite right, either. Plus, we've switched to a different brand of sensors since then for programming reasons. Oh well, I'll just have to do it again!

You might notice that the times don't match up quite right. That's because I entered the time difference between samples on my device as 0.01 seconds, when it was actually 0.015 seconds. Oh well. I'll fix it next time.

The Surf Shop

When I came to Caltech, I had never surfed before. It was always something that I wanted to do one day, but the beaches in Maryland are crowded and the waves aren't very good. So, I had no experience surfing and no idea how to start. Luckily, Caltech has a Surfing and Windsurfing Club.

The Surfing and Windsurfing Club at Caltech is one of the most active clubs here. As part of the club, they have a Surf Shop just to the east of Brown Gym. There, they store all their surfboards and wetsuits (a necessity in the chilly Pacific, especially during the school year). Members of the club get a key to the shop and can rent boards for dirt-cheap rates.

In addition to the Surf Shop, the club also hosts a few big surf trips through the year. I first went on one of these my sophomore year. Everybody picked out their wetsuit (or one that might fit, if given the chance), then strapped boards onto all the available cars. Then, everybody piled into the cars and headed up to Mondo's Beach, which is a nice beginner beach.

There, Gaylord was waiting for us. He's a surfing instructor who's worked with Caltech for a long, long time. He may be old enough to have surfed with guys who remember Bob Simmons (the inventor of the modern surfboard, a Caltech alum)! He's a tiny man, with very tan skin from being at the beach all day, but he's an expert surfer. Even when nobody else could catch a wave because they were too small, he was still zooming back and forth across the surf. He's also very chatty about politics, but that's a story for another day.

Gaylord showed us how to control the board, how to deal with waves that are too big, how to catch a wave, how to turn around, all the important things. Then, we got right into the water! I didn't catch any waves my first time out, but I still had a great time!

It's really nice that clubs like the Surfing and Windsurfing Club can offer services like this to Caltech students. Renting surfboards at the beach is pretty expensive, and buying your own even more so. This way, you get to try out different kinds of boards, and you can rent as many as you need if you're going with a group of friends. Plus, with the Honor Code, renting is very easy. A single sheet of paper and an envelope for money is all that it takes!

The surf shop, with all of its surfboards: