Dr. Short shared more papers for me to read specifically focussed on gaze. Through these papers I hope to:
- see how gaze is tracked technically
- think about a research question around gaze
On the technical end, I played around with openface for gaze tracking and set it up. I now need to think about how to incorporate it into ros. Having the higher-level map of how things would connect is important before diving right into coding, so I shall focus on that next week.
Outside of my personal work, Isaac gave me a rundown of information theory in order to explain the groundbreaking thinking behind Sergey Levine’s work. Isaac is kind and generous with his time, and is great at giving rundowns of things–I amgrateful to get to work with him. Also, I had a blast at this week’s lab hacking hours! I started off really shy and not wanting to bog down Jindan and Isaac as they were trying to fix a robot’s face. However, when I saw that they were setting up a microcontroller (Teensy), I got more confident because I have played around with ArduinoUNO a lot. We were all working through the setup together along with Dr. Short’s guidance and I was able to actually contribute to the progress of the setup! I do think that sometimes I got too carried away with the excitement of being able to contribute and started thinking out loud (happened thrice) instead of fully thinking through a thought before saying it–I’m glad I caught it happening. I do think I bogged them down for a moment in those instances but they were all very kind in the way they kept moving on with the setup process. I take these moments of contribution as great wins as I felt like a productive member of the lab and I learn to humble myself and be less impulsive from the moments when I made statements from a place of baseless confidence. During the process of setting up the teensy, we came across a udev rules which allows us to identify external devices regardless of the port that they’re plugged into. They are extremely important for roboticists to know as robotics often involves plugging and unplugging devices old and new and this “consistent naming of devices guarantees that scripts dependent on a specific device’s existence will not be broken”. Dr. Short gave us a crash course on udev rules–their importance and their power (potentially destructive if used without good knowledge). We even went over 3 potential solutions involvign udev rules to a problem that we faced and analysed the pros and cons of each one to figure out which one will actually work the way we need. I really appreciate Dr. Short’s patient guidance. I believe I am able to learn so much first hand because it is a relatively new lab and everyone is still in the process of setting things up. I am grateful to have this opportunity.