Hi everyone, I finally found an apartment. It is a very small apartment that I share with a kid from Italy who is studying here at the university, and actually has a class with Prof. Maggi with whom I am working with. Last week I basically read up on some humanitarian logistics literature. I also had to research donors and what influences they have concerning NGO (non governmental organizations). These Humanitarian organizations are wary of taken donations from Governments because Humanitarian organizations should be politically neutral, so that they can help both sides of the conflict.
In the last few days I helped with some data entry into excel for the Prof. This did not have anything to do with humanitarian logistics but it had to be done. Today I will start to look at some case studies that had to do with past disasters like the Gujarat Earthquake which happened in 2001. I will looking to the different NGOs and what kind of logistical problems they had and then compare it to other disasters and what logistical problems they ran into. I was hoping to do more hands on things here but since my experience with logistics is quite limited I guess that will be somewhat difficult.
Last weekend right after the meeting in Lausanne I went to Interlaken for an ‘open air’ concert. 40 bands played over 3 days and there where 2 stages, it was amazing.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
my own bite-sized piece of Neuroscience
Salut!
I spent my first day in the lab last Monday passing around the 7 grad students in the lab, and talking to them about their projects and what a 2 1/2 month intern (moi) could do working with them. The Computational Neuroscience Lab, and maybe the field in general, can be divided roughly between people who have a physics background and people who have a computer science background; research may be on models of a single spiking electron, or on systems level modeling of a particular behavior.
I was very tempted to start working with those working on single electron models because it had the most in common with my limited background. It came down to deciding to work on the project most clear to me in its scope and motivation.
So, I am testing various algorithms that perform Independent Component Analysis (ICA). An everyday example of ICA is when you focus on one person's voice in a noisy room full of competing voices; our brains are able to distinguish meaningful signals when they are superimposed with various other signals. There are many existing ICA algorithms that do the trick, but they do not perform signal processing in a way that is plausible for neurons, i.e. they neglect the temporal order of the signals. The goal is to compare the performance of several ICA algorithms that take different approaches, including one developed here that takes a biological approach.
I find thinking about modeling a brain function with a computation interesting, but the everyday work is not the same as day-dreaming about it's mysterious description. The challenge of the past week and a half has been to figure out what is important from an immense amount of literature full of technical detail. I get re-directed by talking to my grad-student advisor Claudia. She seems to have mastered reading papers for what is relevant without getting stuck in the details. If I manage to learn that skill from her, I'd will be a very grateful intern.
Jess
I spent my first day in the lab last Monday passing around the 7 grad students in the lab, and talking to them about their projects and what a 2 1/2 month intern (moi) could do working with them. The Computational Neuroscience Lab, and maybe the field in general, can be divided roughly between people who have a physics background and people who have a computer science background; research may be on models of a single spiking electron, or on systems level modeling of a particular behavior.
I was very tempted to start working with those working on single electron models because it had the most in common with my limited background. It came down to deciding to work on the project most clear to me in its scope and motivation.
So, I am testing various algorithms that perform Independent Component Analysis (ICA). An everyday example of ICA is when you focus on one person's voice in a noisy room full of competing voices; our brains are able to distinguish meaningful signals when they are superimposed with various other signals. There are many existing ICA algorithms that do the trick, but they do not perform signal processing in a way that is plausible for neurons, i.e. they neglect the temporal order of the signals. The goal is to compare the performance of several ICA algorithms that take different approaches, including one developed here that takes a biological approach.
I find thinking about modeling a brain function with a computation interesting, but the everyday work is not the same as day-dreaming about it's mysterious description. The challenge of the past week and a half has been to figure out what is important from an immense amount of literature full of technical detail. I get re-directed by talking to my grad-student advisor Claudia. She seems to have mastered reading papers for what is relevant without getting stuck in the details. If I manage to learn that skill from her, I'd will be a very grateful intern.
Jess
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Tess: second update: settling in
Project
I am currently modifying a 2D model of the knee under load in ABAQUS. It takes at least half an hour to run a simulation, so I multitask by reading about knee anatomy and other background topics such as finite element analysis and other fun fun fun things.
EPFL
My lab has around 20 grad students, which seems enormous compared to the 6 or so in my lab in the US. The lab is split into two different groups which cooperate on related topics, which seems fairly common around here. One group does mainly tissue engineering while the other does more mechanics. Many of the students are working on their Master's projects, which they complete in four months after their Bachelor's and Master's classes. The Bachelor's takes 2-3 years, during which students take both general science classes and classes in their major, which can be quite narrow (e.g.: micro technologies, neuroscience...). During the fourth year, students take advanced classes, but are also required to work 12 hours a week on a research project in a lab. I don't know if it would be possible for a student from the US system to do a Master's here; it might be simpler to skip directly to the PhD (~3 years).
Recently we have been eating at the Satellite, a student-run bar where they sell sandwiches, have games available, and indulge in a large collection of comic books. It's a very friendly place which reflects the bohemian student culture that I love.
Geneva
Is great. We finally went night swimming in the lake last night! This weekend in the music festival, so I hope we will go exploring and discover cool little places to hang out as well as new music. (I will post photos after this weekend).
cheers!
- tess
I am currently modifying a 2D model of the knee under load in ABAQUS. It takes at least half an hour to run a simulation, so I multitask by reading about knee anatomy and other background topics such as finite element analysis and other fun fun fun things.
EPFL
My lab has around 20 grad students, which seems enormous compared to the 6 or so in my lab in the US. The lab is split into two different groups which cooperate on related topics, which seems fairly common around here. One group does mainly tissue engineering while the other does more mechanics. Many of the students are working on their Master's projects, which they complete in four months after their Bachelor's and Master's classes. The Bachelor's takes 2-3 years, during which students take both general science classes and classes in their major, which can be quite narrow (e.g.: micro technologies, neuroscience...). During the fourth year, students take advanced classes, but are also required to work 12 hours a week on a research project in a lab. I don't know if it would be possible for a student from the US system to do a Master's here; it might be simpler to skip directly to the PhD (~3 years).
Recently we have been eating at the Satellite, a student-run bar where they sell sandwiches, have games available, and indulge in a large collection of comic books. It's a very friendly place which reflects the bohemian student culture that I love.
Geneva
Is great. We finally went night swimming in the lake last night! This weekend in the music festival, so I hope we will go exploring and discover cool little places to hang out as well as new music. (I will post photos after this weekend).
cheers!
- tess
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Full Throttle - Work Meet and Move
Its been a while since my arrival in Switzerland. A lot is going on both in and outside the campus. Last week we had a great get together with other research scholars. Though the day was not the best possible in terms of weather, it turned out to be enjoyable for all of us. Thanks Todd for organizing the meet. There were six of us, me, Todd, Jess & Tess, Katy and Brian. Brian came a long way from Lugano. We talked about our experiences as we stepped in the country living etc. We had lunch and then visited the famous Collection de l'Art Brut. It was amazing. The intrigue of human mind is reflected in those lines and threads in every piece kept there.
A Piece of Art Kept in the Museum
The weekend was even more exciting. Me with a couple of friends decided to finally explore our own Lausanne :) on saturday and Geneva and Chillon on Sunday. The trip was wonderful. The pics are available in http://picasaweb.google.com/sumankalyan/.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Week 3 is coming to an end and things are still going really well. I spent the first two weeks reviewing the literature on the relationship between possible links visuospatial transformations and perspective-taking (adopting a first or third person perspective) and the mechanism by which we distinguish ourselves from others as well as the involvement of the parietal lobe in these functions. I am just finishing up programming an experiment which examines various types of mental transformations--transformations of objects and transformations of people, which is strongly suggested to involve simulation of own-body movements to arrive in the same orientation as the target. I wll also examine if background context provides a cue as to whether to adopt a first or third person perspective when mentally rotating or taking the perspective of another person. Using questionnaires, I will also explore a possible link between visuospatial perspective taking and higher-order theory of mind type perspective taking. Anyways, that was a mouthful :) Next week I hope to begin recruiting both healthy volunteers and parietal lesion patients to perform the experiment.
On Thursday before the Research Ambassadors meeting in Lausanne, I visited Olaf Blanke's group at the EPFL--they are doing some really cool work on perspective-taking, how the mind perceives the body, and out-of-body experiences. I got a chance to meet with the grad students and sit in on a course. I didn't really have that much time to form super-strong impressions about differences between grad school here and in the States, but something I did notice was that there seemed to be much less of a 'Publish or Perish' sort of attitude. A lot of the students seemed to have a main project, and then a few other side "fun" projects they were working on and it seemed to me that they were more likely to pursue more out-of-the-box creative and unique ideas than grad students in the US. I've also noticed that with Peter Brugger--that people here seem to have a little more fun with experiments and enjoy the exploratory aspect of it. I don't know if it's because it's more competitive to get a faculty job in the US or because there is more funding here, or it's just unique to the labs that I've been to here.
Also enjoying life outside of the lab! I'm living with 6 other ETH students, so I feel like I'm really getting a sense of what it's like to live and be a student there. I'm also being forced into being a fan of the Stuttgard football team and to learn all the Germany cheers. Today I rode a bike for the first time since I was.. 8 maybe... and lived to tell the tale. And it was great meeting some of the others in Lausanne on Friday!
Cheers,
Katy
On Thursday before the Research Ambassadors meeting in Lausanne, I visited Olaf Blanke's group at the EPFL--they are doing some really cool work on perspective-taking, how the mind perceives the body, and out-of-body experiences. I got a chance to meet with the grad students and sit in on a course. I didn't really have that much time to form super-strong impressions about differences between grad school here and in the States, but something I did notice was that there seemed to be much less of a 'Publish or Perish' sort of attitude. A lot of the students seemed to have a main project, and then a few other side "fun" projects they were working on and it seemed to me that they were more likely to pursue more out-of-the-box creative and unique ideas than grad students in the US. I've also noticed that with Peter Brugger--that people here seem to have a little more fun with experiments and enjoy the exploratory aspect of it. I don't know if it's because it's more competitive to get a faculty job in the US or because there is more funding here, or it's just unique to the labs that I've been to here.
Also enjoying life outside of the lab! I'm living with 6 other ETH students, so I feel like I'm really getting a sense of what it's like to live and be a student there. I'm also being forced into being a fan of the Stuttgard football team and to learn all the Germany cheers. Today I rode a bike for the first time since I was.. 8 maybe... and lived to tell the tale. And it was great meeting some of the others in Lausanne on Friday!
Cheers,
Katy
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Bern
Dear all,The ThinkSwiss community reads your blogs with great curiosity and interest. We are particularly keen on hearing about the similarities and differences between Swiss and U.S. research labs and whether you think doing a master’s program or Ph.D. is an attractive option for U.S. researchers.
I would also like to inform you about the meeting at the U.S. embassy in Bern on July 13 (the program was sent to you by email). I am pleased to tell you that Presence Switzerland (http://www.presence.ch/) will offer your
train tickets, lunch, and tour through Bern – the charming Swiss capital. Please note the meeting is only for the scholarship recipients (not for tutors or professors). Lucien Aegerter of Presence Switzerland is glad to welcome you at the railway station meeting point in Bern.
train tickets, lunch, and tour through Bern – the charming Swiss capital. Please note the meeting is only for the scholarship recipients (not for tutors or professors). Lucien Aegerter of Presence Switzerland is glad to welcome you at the railway station meeting point in Bern.I wish you a pleasant meeting tomorrow in Lausanne and would like to thank Todd for organizing this getting together!
Lab Update
Work. Read. Travel. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. Basic elements to any productive life-style. Though these things happen in varying intensity at different times the pattern is consistent.
The past few weeks I have been constructing a functioning prototype of an I/O Wall ( Input/Output Wall ). The basic premise is to monitor both the objects on shelving and the activity of the person(s) taking things from said wall. A picture of my test-shelving is below,
By the way, the chair is very comfortable. I don't mince words. I am hoping to get good data to use for data-mining applications to better influence the design and architecture of future buildings.
Several weeks ago our lab was visited by the editors of Tracés Magazine. They wanted to do a special issue on some of the work in our lab. One of the projects I am working on is in the magazine. If you happen by it the issue is Tracés, Issue 10 6 Juin 2007. Our work on Interactive Ceilings is on page 21. Sadly, we need more pictures but as my work progresses the available bits of multimedia consumable by the public will inevitably increase.
a bientot
Matthew Todd
The past few weeks I have been constructing a functioning prototype of an I/O Wall ( Input/Output Wall ). The basic premise is to monitor both the objects on shelving and the activity of the person(s) taking things from said wall. A picture of my test-shelving is below,
By the way, the chair is very comfortable. I don't mince words. I am hoping to get good data to use for data-mining applications to better influence the design and architecture of future buildings.Several weeks ago our lab was visited by the editors of Tracés Magazine. They wanted to do a special issue on some of the work in our lab. One of the projects I am working on is in the magazine. If you happen by it the issue is Tracés, Issue 10 6 Juin 2007. Our work on Interactive Ceilings is on page 21. Sadly, we need more pictures but as my work progresses the available bits of multimedia consumable by the public will inevitably increase.
a bientot
Matthew Todd
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