My Purdue Experience - Dimitrios

 On Thursday, I decided not to write a blog entry because, personally, reflecting on the same thing so many times kind of loses its meaning and becomes more of a burden.  Both on Thursday and Friday, I was reading, taking notes, analyzing, and critically selecting research papers relevant to my research goals o of the week. These, from what I have come to understand, are the improvement of image segmentation and image quality assessment, so we can improve the semantic results of the convolutional network already set up to interpret the ultrasound.  In the discussion I had with the person I am assisting, he guided me through the inner workings of the CN they use, explaining the different layers and why they are there. He then told me to work on the preprocessing of the images and the localization of the network.  I did not know where to start researching, so I did what I was taught by my GSTR210 course professor. "When in doubts, google key works." I immediately googl...

 When I went to work today, I did not really know what to expect or where to start. I took some notes from Monday, so I said, why not look at them. This helped a lot, and I started by getting familiar with some Coursera robotics terminology. When I arrived at the lab, no one was there except me and some other undergraduate students. So, I thought from the inside, why not look around and see if I could find anything that I could improve or even clean to make a good impression. I reorganized the 3d printers and a couple of computers, and while I was doing so, I was thinking of the many significant positives of doing research as a job. You make your own schedule, work in a field you like, and learn new things every day were the main bullets. Though, of course, sometimes you get stuck on the very technical stuff that never gets rewarded. One thing that I did not think of before I was done reorganizing was what I saw later that day. The constructive and intellectual discussions that tak...

  Today was the first day in the lab. We walked into the lab, even before Mythra, who is our supervisor. That is because we had no idea what to expect from the internship. People who have attended it in the past have said that it is really tough and rigid, and most of them were seniors, while I will be a sophomore. I have some previous experience with robotics, mainly with Arduino and raspberry pie, but also with some controllers like lego. Walking into the lab, the first thing I noticed was the enormous giant robotic hands. I was very intrigued by looking at them because I precisely looked at what I wanted to do with my career. I am a double major in Bio and CS, and these hands, from what I had read online, were used and taught how to do simple surgeries.  There is a famous joke in Computer Science where we say that we all know what neural networks are, but no one knows how to make one. When Mythra was describing how they used Neural network technology to make these hands l...