London

I went to London this weekend with some other people from my school doing MISTI in Spain and France.  My little little in AXO, Ann is working in Salamanca and flew in with Josh who is working in Madrid.  Another girl from AXO, Joanie, is working in Paris and took the train with Rohan who is also working in Paris.  We stayed in Rohan's apartment in Chelsea and saw almost all of Zone 1 in 2 days!  It was a really amazing weekend, and I probably got 8 hours of sleep over the course of 3 nights.

My flight was delayed, so I got to Rohan's with Ann and Josh around midnight on Friday night.  His apartment was incredible and definitely nicer than any hotel I could have afforded.  After arriving and going over our itinerary for the weekend (which was extremely packed), we went to a club in London called Fabric.  It was basically everything I would think of for a stereotypical underground London club.   We got back around 4:30, with enough time to get 2-3 hours of sleep before our wakeup call.

Rohan cooked us a traditional full English breakfast before we headed out to St. Paul's Cathedral, which might be my favorite part of the trip.

This is Joanie and Ann at the top.  The wind definitely woke all of us up.  The view was absolutely incredible!  Definitely worth the 530 steps up to the top.

Next on the agenda was Buckingham Palace.  We just missed the changing of the guards but it was still pretty cool.  We also took some phone booth pictures on the way :)

Next we went to Harrod's for lunch.  We picknicked with all of our Harrod's food in Hyde Park.  From the left, that's Rohan, me, Ann, Joanie, Nicole, and Josh.  Nicole is Josh's friend from high school and since she's working in London this summer, she met up with us for most of the weekend.  We had a really fun group of people :)

From Hyde Park, we made our way to see Big Ben, Waterloo Bridge, and the London Eye.  It was a great walk along the water and we got to see a lot of monuments along the way.  

Saturday night we went to a more posh club near Piccadilly Square.  This is us outside Rohan's apartment in Chelsea.  

This club was possibly the classiest place I've ever been.  Rohan (who we discovered is very wealthy), dropped $600 on that bottle of Champagne Josh is holding.  So that glass I'm holding, worth about $100.  It was definitely the best Champagne I've ever had.  At one point Ann said, "This is nicer Champagne than I'll have at my wedding."  

The next morning (after another quick 2-3 hours of sleep), we went to a tour at the Globe Theatre.  It was really cool and the tour guide was a really funny speaker.  Next we went to a tour at the London Dungeon.  Since they don't allow pictures inside, this was all I got.  But I highly recommend this if you plan on visiting London.  It was great!  It's an interactive tour with actors playing people from the 1600s.  They cover Jack the Ripper, the plague, and Sweeney Todd.  It was definitely scary!

 Next we made our way to London Tower and the Tower Bridge for some more windy pictures.  We saw the crown jewels and learned a lot about the history of London.  From the London Tower, we got a great view of the Olympic rings on the Tower Bridge.

 We walked around some more and got Indian food for dinner.  This was one of the last pictures I took since my battery died.  Which is unfortunate since there were so many picture opportunities Sunday night!  I'll add some once other people from the trip post pictures.  We found a bar to watch the EuroCup final at, called Metra (it turned into a club after the game).  Since Spain won 4-0, it was lucky that most of the bar consisted of Spanish fans.  We got seats on top of the DJ table which was lucky since probably over a hundred people were standing (it was extremely crowded).  Being in the streets afterwards was an incredible experience.  It was like one giant Spain themed party.  People were screaming and singing and climbing on statues and the entire square was covered in people.  After a while we went home and Joanie, Ann, and I decided that since wake up call Monday morning was 3:30, we would go to bed (another 3 hours).  Josh and Rohan decided to just stay up all night and go to a gay bar (neither of them are gay), and said they had a great time, despite Josh being pretty nervous about it :)

Monday morning we left earlier than we got back Friday night, and I got back to my house in Zurich around 11.  I ended up not going into work because I was so tired and took a 3 hour nap before starting to work from home.  I woke up this morning still tired so hopefully by tomorrow I'll be back to normal. The weekend was definitely the most jam packed weekend of my life, and I had a great time!

Opengazer

So I finally got this eye tracking software to work!  It took tons of debugging (it wasn't developed for OS X and was only supported by old versions of existing computer vision libraries) but I finally got it to work!  Here's a screen shot:

I got those purple and blue dots in the top left corner by just LOOKING THERE!  I can move them all around the screen.  This software is awesome!  Credit to the developers of Opengazer at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge University Engineering Department.  Really cool technology!

The next step in my project would be to take the data from this program and use it to manipulate simulated objects.

Muesli

I had to write a post about Muesli, or specifically Birchermuesli which is possibly my new favorite food (or at least breakfast food).  This is Birchermuesli I got from Sprungli:

It might look weird but it's seriously one of the best things I've ever eaten.  It's apparently really easy to make too.  Muesli is a breakfast cereal here of rolled oats with some combination of seeds, dried fruit, and nuts.  From my understanding, to make this kind of Birchermuesli you take rolled oats and soak them in either juice or water for at least a few hours to soften it.  Then you add yogurt, fruit, and nuts and/or seeds.  This one had bananas and raspberries.  So good!! I'm definitely going to try to make this when I come home!

First Week of Work

I'm halfway through my first week of work, and so far so good!  I'm struggling a little with my project, but I know its in the research stage so I'm trying not to stress too much.  My first day the post-doc I am working for showed me a bunch of projects that the group has done/is working on and its exactly what I want to do!

I got to read through some things and decide what I want to work on.  I am really interested in particle/physical based modeling (like modeling water or smoke with a bunch of particles and determining their movement with physics), but I know that I'm definitely not as experienced as a lot of people here and so wouldn't be able to produce results anywhere near the things she was showing me.  So I decided to work on an integration of two things because it will let me see some physical modeling code and it will produce cool results if I can get it to work.

Basically I'm going to try to integrate existing open source eye tracker technology with existing deformable object code.  Deformable objects are basically not rigid objects (like real world objects that change in collision--for example, a can will dent if it gets hit, or jello will jiggle when disturbed).  Eye tracker technology would allow the user to move the simulated object around on the screen using only their eyes.  Right now I'm researching different open source eye trackers.  This is proving to be extremely difficult since eye tracker research is extremely new and most eye trackers are either expensive or require special equipment like infrared sensors and headgear.  I'm going to try to either use a standard webcam or most likely a Kinect (XBox) since the Kinect has IR sensors and a webcam.  I can get the Kinect to work on my computer so now I'm trying to figure out how to somehow integrate an open source eyetracker (which mostly are made for windows) with the Kinect.  I have no idea how feasible this is, and right now it looks pretty difficult, but its been done before so hopefully I will make some progress on this.

Overall, its really nice here.  I get my own office because there's a lot of empty space since a group of doctoral candidates just graduated.  I have a huge window with a decent view and every day we all go to lunch together.  I usually get in between 9 and 10 and stay until around 6 or 7.  Most people get in around 10, and she said its flexible, but I figure this way I can get up at 7 and run in the morning and take my time getting ready and eating breakfast.  I don't even mind coming home so late because it's literally a 5 minute walk.


If I didn't already have a job, I would totally apply to graduate school here.  They need more PhD candidates so they have projects that people then apply to.  They pay PhD candidates like 60,000 CHF a year and I think Masters candidates somewhere int he 50,000-60,000 CHF range.  Its definitely expensive to live in Zurich, but getting your Masters/PhD is seen more as a job here.  And there is a very good opportunity to work at Disney during/after your stay here (which comes with cool perks like a "business trip" to Disney Paris).  

The education system here is very different though.  Most people get their Bachelors after 2-3 years and start their Masters directly after that for another 2 years.  Then they start their PhD which usually takes 3-4 years.  They didn't really understand when I said I just finished my Undergraduate/Bachelors and it took me 4 years.  I think Undergraduate for them is Bachelors+Masters.


Well, that's my first week of work so far!  Hopefully I make some progress...

First Post

First blog post!  I'm doing MISTI Switzerland this summer in Zurich, so this is mainly to update friends and family on my stay here.  I'm working in the Computer Graphics Lab at ETH Zurich and I just started yesterday.  So far, work is really cool (there's a lot of Disney funded projects).  I'm living in student housing about 5 minutes away from the Computer Science building.  It's currently raining and kind of cold but it was beautiful yesterday and this weekend is supposed to be nice.  Glad I brought my jacket :)

Here's a view from near University of Zurich!