Grammar

Is my grammar really that bad? Is anyone else's really that good? 

I had a heated discussion today, with a friend of mine, about whether or not my grammar was exceptionally poor. My friend was a Chinese immigrant whose parents do not speak English natively. I learned English through "osmosis" she said; it is filled with errors accrued by being exposed to all manner of colloquialisms and slang while growing up. My parents were both well educated people; my father could be said to have been far too much of an engineer and lacked linguistic refinement. My mother always uses proper grammar, and it is with her in mind that I try develop a better sense of language.

It is ironic, however, that I spent four years at a liberal arts college and found myself without a strong writing ability. To be sure, I did not practice at all and never cared much for expressing my ideas to other people; outside of academic circles at least. 

Anyhow, here is the explanation given by my girlfriend. Someone, who I think, has spent too much time thinking about grammar in her life:

something like "he is better than me", but that wasn't exactly what you said. The error is using the objective case in the elliptical of the subjunctive clause instead of the subjective case. 

Full explanation:
The full sentence without the elliptical is "he is better than i am". It's correct to shorten it and take out the verb of the subjunctive clause, in which case, you get "he is better than i". The pronoun needs to be the subjective case because it's the subject of the subjunctive clause. is the Because people are used to using the objective case when a pronoun occurs at the end of the sentence ("The cat likes him", "Give it to me"), they generalize it too much. It's a *very* common error.

Spring cleaning in Haiku

He breathed in air 

The first time again 

Window ajar 

Sock closed in drawer 

blink, blink

blink...

found L.E.D.

Sponsor's Week

For the first time in a while I felt inspiration today. It was not the economy that prevented me from feeling a sense of optimism, but my own trappings. I enjoy difficult problems and the most interesting and applicable ones often show up in machine learning and signal processing. However, I feel that my enjoyment of this area really misses the point. An experience I had yesterday and today gives me an indication of why that is...

A man visiting our lab was from Bosnia. He had mentioned that many people in his country have lost their limbs to the war that raged on there through the 90's and early 00's. How our work on prosthetics could change the lives of many soldiers who have been amputated from injuries. We could work on a prosthetic that could significantly improve the quality of life for these people if we could just change our prosthetic for use in other parts of the world!

Fall Update: on being a manger and a scientist

Where have I been and what have I been doing?

Its a good question and there a length answer to the above. My summer was successful in doing two things: data collection/analysis and helping me learn how to manage people. While the first assures me that my thesis will be completed on time the second has, in some sense, a more lasting set of lessons. I try to be a constant student, so lets see how well I can summarize my lesson.

The ability to manage a team of intelligent undergraduates at MIT is nontrivial. This is for two very basic reasons; they have a collection of amazing energy and an enthusiasm for technical problems that needs to guided intelligently. The most capable students need little more than a goal and a few nudges along the way to achieve outstanding results. They are very self-reliant and self-learners.

However, how do you balance the need for researchers to naturally develop this very important skill over one summer. If you think of a child who has excellent skills at swimming on an indoor pool. Now you, the parent are on a boat, say now you are going to take the poor kid and toss them in the ocean and swim the same distance that, under normal circumstances, is in an indoor pool. The child knows how to swim, but has never had to deal with all the vagaries of an ocean, like murkiness, large waves and if it is the Atlantic, chilling cold. What does the kid do? Probably gets really frightened and resentful of you for putting them in this situation!

What should have happened in this above scenario? I guess it depends a great deal on who we were talking about, but in the end the parent jumping into the water and helping out would not have been a bad start. Thus in my research and my work I prefer to jump in and 'get wet' at the same time with the problem they are struggling with.

My hope has been this; that my ability to give a detailed picture of what the end of the project should look like technically will guide the trajectory of their research so they solve a set of interesting challenges. Yet at the end produce a practical result which can be incorporated into my thesis.

Anyhow, I have good results from my subjects. With a bit more processing the data should look even better. I just published a quick conference paper in IEEE-Humanoids 2008 and look forward to traveling to South Korea in December. During the spring I will be finishing my MSc thesis and writing a paper for the Journal of Experimental Biology with Hugh.

Summertime

Summertime

When classes are over I have an exuberant, near euphoric actually, sense of possibility. There are so many things I want to do and accomplish. With all this enthusiasm it is hard to figure out which things will bring the most satisfaction. At the moment this is shopping and some research.

Research: I have lost track of progress on my research, because of final projects it seems like my research taken a second seat. However, this is to change pretty much right now. I have a 40 hr/week undergraduate working for me on motion capture experiments for the summer. I probably should know what I am doing before she starts her first day.

A recent paper coming from a lab run by Orendurff, "Local dynamic stability in turning and straight-line gait", shows that steady straight walking on a treadmill is different from turning. The method uses a notion of stability in the sense of Lyapunov. This is different than what I had expected. At first, I thought that looking at the COM vs foot placement would lead to a good way to think about stability of a dynamic system used in walking. While I still thinks its true that looking at the COM projects versus foot placement is useful it seems that there is no clear way to measure stability easily from this information.

I think an analytical method that can separate the two by looking at parameter values is superior. Measuring distances from foot placement to COM is not going to be enough when the transients are happening too quickly and vary highly between subjects.

Errands: About 2 years ago I was living near Harvard square. It was a nice place and relatively safe considering the near-by mayhem of Central square. My mountain bike at the time, a beautiful Cannondale I had built up over the years to perfection, was sitting on the front porch. I am not sure if it was me tempting fate or someone else tempting their own, but either way one morning my bike was lost. I have rectified this massive sadness by getting a new bike (go consumerism) and its now in my basement. Hurah! I am accomplishing things I have been putting off two years. This is progress. I want to attach LEDs somehow to it, but the best way to make a spectacle of myself escapes me at the moment.

Sponsor's Week

Media Lab, Sponsor's Week. NYC.

Every year the Media Lab hosts a "Sponsor's Week" that bring together the Media Lab's professors, students, and researchers for a three day networking, technology and educational events around the lab. This year the theme was "Trust Me." and largely this was an apt theme.

My own group is developing a number of different devices to assist people with amputations. Grant Elliot, a Ph.D student in our lab, has developed a running ankle that provides additional power to the amputee through a motor attached to a more conventional running prosthesis. This is a bit like a normal human running on their toes with a motor attached to the their tibia anterior, with added advantage of extra power during landing of each step.

Going back a week earlier, I was in New York City to visit my god mother in Tribeca, Mahattan. She took us out to a great breakfast in a nice hipster café near SoHo. It was delicious and in a nice lounge atmosphere, as the picture below can easily attest,

My god mom is great and has the career every fashion obsessed woman probably desires. She is in the top of her field as a textile designer for the fashion industry in NYC. She likes Prada ^_^

I cannot help love NYC, and despite being brought up about 60 minutes away in Connecticut, I never managed to make it there very often. Now that I am older I make frequent trips to visit my friends from college who are trying to make it as a actors in the city. Adam La Faci is one such person. He has been in NYC since he graduated from Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2005. I cannot help but imagine how difficult his daily activities must be. He has three agents, is constantly networking and going to interviews. However, we convinced him to come out to Union Square to meet us and, among other things, spin a large rotating cube near Soho.

Perhaps I should go back to NYC again soon?

MIT IAP 2008 so far....

I like to take side projects to delve deeply into areas outside my academic research. IAP is by far the best time to do this. In my last entry I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish this year and so far it looks like somethings will get done and others will fall a little by the way-side.

I finally got to try my hands at both python and OpenCV. (link) As part of the 3 day "Affective Computing and Autism Technology" workshop hosted by the Affective Computing Group I prototyped a small computer vision system to do very basic feature recognition. After using a Haar wavelet-based face detection algorithm from OpenCV a small rectangle is drawn around the face. From the pixels drawn inside this rectangle a histogram is taken of the person's face and an SVM is trained on the vectors describing how much of each color is present in the rectangle.


Sadly, since there was only 6 hours to work on the project we were unable to finish a full prototype. The system written by PhD Candidate Jackie Lee and other members of the Affective Computing group. The main problems that this system and all facial recognitions systems encounter is variable lighting levels. Some methods are more prone than others and histograms are VERY PRONE to light conditions. A better might be thresholding the image to greyscale or using edge features. Another different might be to use a specialty kernel in the SVM, though given the short length of the project this avenue did not get pursued.

I have also been running tests and other trials in the Holodeck at CSAIL. I am trying to understand the relevance of ZMP and the Center of Mass in turning movements in humanoid walking. So far so good. I also got to capture Xiao Xiao dancing a bit in the lab with markers on. Next time, break dancers!