Let me explain...no, we have no time. Let me sum up.

The title of this post is paraphrased from The Princess Bride.

This last semester was rough. Not too long after my last post, the CHI submission deadline past. I'm writing this post from my hostel room in Vancouver, so that should tell you what happened with that submission. (It was accepted.) I went through the appeals process, and was told that I would have to both retake my qualifying exam AND take an automata class. Only a week or so after that, I lost one of my best friends to a sudden illness.

I flew back home to California for her funeral. It was unbelievably hard. Jessica was the first person that I lost since I was a very small child, and it still doesn't make any sense. I was back in classes not too long after that, struggling to be functional. I sat my qualifying exams for the third time in late March, not at my best by far.

Throughout this, I've been continuing work on the EcoCollage project, setting up my new website, working on a group project in my HCI course that went haywire during the data collection because it's very difficult to get eye-tracking to work well when you've never used that hardware before. We ended up performing the entire experiment for a second time, three weeks from the due date, and pushing through the analysis on time. My most sincere regret is that we weren't able to submit an IRB application in time, so /this/ set of data can not be submitted to CHI, despite the lack of personal identifiers.

In late April I was informed that once again, I received conditional passes. I pretty much resigned myself to finding a job. My adviser? Not so much. My adviser pushed hard on the committee, emphasizing both the publications I have and the work I've done and the person I am, until they said, "fine" and requested that I take the algorithms class at UIC. This is a good thing, as I am certainly not sufficiently algo'd up. I'll be taking the class with a professor I find fascinating, who is tough but fair, which I need. This is lesson number one of graduate school: your adviser is your one and only advocate. Their interest in you can save your career.

So at this moment, I'm in a pretty good mood. Again, I'm going to make a steady attempt to push hard on actually using this blog. The next few posts will be advice about attending a conference on the magnitude of CHI, and some tips that I learned. Since I'm unfortunately too aware of how few people read this, I'm going to put blog-writing in my calendar as a weekly(?) activity, until I grow accustomed to it.

Terrible Blogger, Me.

I'm a terrible blogger. I really am. Consistency is something that I'm going to work on. So until I get bored/distracted again, I'm going to try a bit more firmly to summarize/review a paper each week day that I don't have school. Starting Monday, because that's when school starts. 3 days a week. Papers! About ubiquitous gaming. And epistemic gaming. And whatever I end up reading for class on the side! So. Look forward to that!

Brought to you by the procrastinating on my work-in-progress poster submission for CHI.

Haar Classifier Training Program

If you haven't used Processing to power through some small application that you need, I highly recommend it. (I just now remembered I still haven't posted about my poster in the conference, and given that it's officially published, I can officially talk about at least the extent to what we've done so far. Next post will be on that.) In any case, as part of the research, we're now switching to an OpenCV implementation, which means training a Haar Classifier. Now this is a task that is...a pain. It involves ideally thousands of images, and if you want the best accuracy, you should hand-annotate where your object is in the images.

To avoid going crazy and needing to destroy everything in the lab, I wrote a short app in processing to create the Haar file. I'll probably post a link to the code after I've completed the training on our images and verified that it doesn't start eating memory like no-one's business for large samples, since I had tried so very hard to avoid writing this app myself. Still, using Processing, it took all of 30 minutes to produce something that will be useful. I could've spent more time with the interface, and if I decide to release it, I very well may modify the code to have a nicer I/F and support multiple occurrences in the same image, but for now, this little app is sufficient for my purposes.

For the record, there's something utterly satisfying about completing a program in under an hour. :)

UbiComp 2010: Paper of MY Conference

So while this paper was not nominated for best paper, and should not have been, it did quite a bit for me personally in terms of considering structure for my own future thesis.

Andrea Grimes, Vasudhara Kantroo and Rebecca E. Grinter (2010). Let's Play! Mobile Health Games for Adults. Proc. of UBICOMP 2010. (Link is to Ms.Grimes website, and you can find the full paper on the publications page.)

Let me sum up the gist of the idea, rather than going into the details of the paper, as there are some fundamental problems with the study. The gist is that a casual game might be better suited for games that aim to improve behavior. The behavior here was based on healthy eating, and the research targeted African American individuals because of the high incidence of diabetes among that population. The game was designed with food items that such folks would find in their neighborhoods, including soul food type items, sandwiches, etc.

The critical part for me was the introduction of the casual game premise. I had been structuring my thesis idea around epistemic games, thinking only in terms of long story arc type things, and listening to this proposal has given me an alternate idea. I'm definitely going to need to start with an exploratory study to examine which of those two paths is going to be the better choice for me, I think. Additionally, discussing the shape of the study and what might have been a better question for the study format has helped me think about how to structure my own studies to avoid those types of critiques.

I'm likely going to blog about a few more of the papers that were interesting or that I discussed in a critical fashion with Leilah as well.

Academics: Very Smart, Very Dumb

I have one major complaint about UbiComp 2010 as far as comfort goes. The seatting arrangement during the presentations is a typical lecture hall, but one with absolutely no space to move if someone is sitting in a chair. For some reason, every single person will opt to sit on the very end of the row. This means that every person who is not in the lecture hall before the presentation begins has to squeeze past those folks who sat down first. This is particularly difficult as some folks refuse to stand up to let people pass.

This is particularly humiliating in my case. I'm not a small woman by most standards, and it. is. not. comfortable. for me to move myself and my laptop pass you. You're forcing me to choose to show you either my rear or my front in a small area. It is awkward for me. I can't imagine you're enjoying it that much, given your reluctance to even stand up. When I say "Excuse me," it isn't a request for you to turn your knees to the side, which adds maybe three inches to the first three that were there. I'm simply not six inches wide.

So please, colleagues. If you're organizing a conference, do choose a venue that it is accessible for various body types. If you're at a conference that doesn't have wide aisles, either sit near the center of the row, or be prepared to stand up when people need to get by.

A further update about UbiComp as far as interesting papers went will be posted either later today or tomorrow.

Software Review: Mendeley

Finding a resource management software ended up being really easy. I searched cross-plastform because I work on a Mac in the lab, a PC at home, and up until today, my laptop was running ubuntu. (Since ASUS is no longer providing drivers for linux, and I really wanted to be able to skype with Braden while in Denmark, I'm installing Windows on it, at least temporarily.) Mendeley is absolutely fantastic. It scans pdfs to try and autofill citation information, while allowing you to sync files or information across computers. I'm so into this software right now. I have't encountered any bugs that I want gone or features that I'm desperately missing.

Mendeley exports to EndNote if you happen to have access to commercial software, as well as exporting to BibTex. I'm digging it so far. I'd chat it up a bit more, but I need to put together my personal-item purse/bag/whatevs for the flight to Denmark. :)

Catching Up/Getting Ahead

It's been a while because I haven't yet gotten through my thick skull that blogging more frequently might actually assist me in keeping my thoughts straight about the various projects I'm working on. This semester started all of two weeks ago, and things haven't really started to kick in full gear yet as far as academics are concerned, though I've been out of town for the last two weekends and have two more social engagements on the next two weekends, and then get to take a plane to my first ever real-computer-science-conference.

What? I never posted here about that? Right, well the poster paper on Paper-to-Parameters was accepted to UbiComp. On September 25th, I take my first international flight using my first passport(which cost me way too much money), to go to the first conference where my first paper ever will be published. I've spent a lot of time in the last week working on the poster, and working considerably harder since realizing that this may very well be a conference I'll want to be taken seriously at when I'm working the angles on my thesis.

Question to be asked at the department sometime soon: can we publish partial parts of our PhD research in a similar way to how the work we're doing right now is being published as a WiP in a couple of conference before the final paper is published? I really don't know these things at UIC yet, and I have a feeling it could be critical.

I'm planning on applying to the NSFGRF program this year. Getting accepted means some $30,000 a year stipend, along with an allotted tuition waiver, as well as travel assistance. It would also mean free time to actually do my research without having to work for someone else. The other nice thing about the NSFGRF is that it basically sets me up to get background work done for my thesis and to put some really intense thought into what I want to do and how I would do it. It's basically a mini-grant proposal. I'm actually really excited to start working on it, if only I could start budgeting my time better.

A couple of things I'm going to try and do: find a reference management software that I like, and then leave the references in my dropbox folder so I can access them from all three computers. Write up short reviews here again for papers that I've read, because well, I should be doing that anyway as I finish the papers to avoid re-reading too deeply the ones that are uninteresting/disconnected from what I'm doing. Discuss with Leilah what is appropriate to be spoken of with the internet before publication so that I can figure out just how much to reveal here about what I'm currently working on. Some open source software reviews for various toolkits I've been having to use.

For now, that's catch up time. I'm working on putting together a study group for the Foundations exam amongst my fellow graduate students, so that may be updated here as well.