Rabble of Robots

Somehow it has been five (5!!!) months since I last updated this blog. I don’t know how time has passed so quickly, but I’m told it only gets worse. Good news is, at this rate I’ll be done with my Ph.D. in what feels like no time at all!

What have I done with the past five months of my life? Good question. It has been such a whirlwind, I’m not even sure I know the answer. Here’s a short rundown:

Fall quarter: (September – December)

I had one primary objective coming into this adventure:
don’t fail out of grad school in the first term.

I succeeded!! YAY!

In fall, I worked with one professor and took two classes. I talked a bit about both classes in the last post, and the moral of the story is one of the two classes ended up accounting for 80% of my stress last quarter.

I am on rotation, which means I am working with a different professor each quarter for my first year. This gives me (and them) an opportunity to try out the advisor/advisee relationship and figure out where my research interests align. Last quarter, I was working with one professor and the research went…. well basically nowhere. It took a long time to get a project off the ground, so nothing of substance was accomplished. The downside of being on rotation is there is a very short window in which to actually get things done, and the research is constantly competing with class deadlines.  When it’s a choice between “this is due tomorrow and worth 20% of my grade” and “this is a vague thing that should happen by the end of the quarter”…. well, you can guess which wins out.

So… that brings us to December.

Winter “break”!!

Winter break was an awesome opportunity to just unwind and decompress after a stressful and crazy first quarter. I took about two weeks to visit the bay, see my family, and visit my friends and old coworkers. It was a perfect reminder of just how much I miss everyone – it was so wonderful to see people and so sad to have to say goodbye all over again.

I call it a “break” because I still had research obligations, even though classes were out. During break, my goal was to learn about deep learning and neural networks. I was moderately successful at picking up the basics. Luckily, the project I’m working on went a slightly different direction, so I didn’t end up needing to know nearly as much as originally thought.

Spring quarter:

Quarters are 11 weeks including finals, and we’re already in week 7. The time flies so quickly around here.

This quarter, I’m taking two classes and working with two professors. Luckily, my two classes are taught by the two advisors, so it’s a manageable workload (as much as that’s a thing in grad school).

The projects I’m working on with both professors are are leaning toward deep learning for path planning. What does that mean?

• Deep learning is a big hot buzzword in most computer realms right now. It’s basically a giant math box. In short, it takes in a bunch of good examples of the thing you’re trying to do and learns a model of how to do that thing well.
• Path planning is exactly what it sounds like – how to get a robot to plan a path from point A to point B on its own. Robots are surprisingly horrible at successfully navigating their way through the world. How do we get them to do this better, with as little help as possible?

So “deep learning for path planning” is basically “can I get a robot to move from point A to point B a bunch of times and learn on its own the best way to do that?” So far, I’m still on the “get a robot to move” stage. It’s a long process.

This quarter, the main thing I have found is I’m learning to balance how much I have to do right now, what I need to do for long-term projects, and what I should do so I don’t burn out, go crazy, or just break down. I do not have this balance down, but am finding small ways to get closer to it. I honestly believe there is no perfect balance of all of these in life, and especially in grad school. I guess the key is to be okay with being out of balance, and find a way to get as close as possible.

What’s next?

Right now I’m focused on finishing up my projects for this quarter and setting up my rotation for next quarter. I would like to definitively say this is my last quarter taking two classes, but stranger things have happened. Next quarter, I will be working with a different professor, and am either going to be working on multiagent systems (lots of robots working together as a group) and/or human-robot interaction (which is exactly what it sounds like).