Week 5

Importance of Networking

This is the end of Week 5 and we are at the halfway mark of this program!!! “We’re halfway there!” This week I would like to start off by talking about the network session we had this Wednesday! This week we had Dr. Selma Sabanovic  and Sam Tobin-Hochstadt come and speak with us about networking. They gave some great tips on how to network in different environments. A thing that really stood out to me was how to contact a professor. The best thing to do is to send an email that is short and concise. Professor’s do not want to read novels in their emails. Also, if you do not hear back from them within two weeks, it is best to send another email stating your concern. Try to stay away from the ” cheesy” “Mr. Professor” type emails and make sure to be always be specific!

One thing that came across my mind during our Wednesday session was that it is always good thing to network! You never know if you will meet or work with someone in the future. I have an real-life example to share where that actually happened to me. This February I attended the ERN (Emerging Researchers National) Conference in Washington D.C. I attended the oral undergraduate student presentations. One of the students presenting happen to be was Mr. Joshua Bailey, a senior from Mississippi Valley State University.  I really enjoyed his presentation and I  thought he was a pretty interesting guy. I happen to speak with him the next day during the undergraduate poster session. I told him I enjoyed his presentation and we discussed interests, internships and graduate school. It was nice meeting and talking with him, but of course I never thought I would see him again. Well let’s fast forward to Indianapolis airport on May 20th. I was waiting to catch the shuttle to head to bradford woods, and in walks Mr. Bailey lol. To make it even more humorous he happens to work in the same lab and we are working on the same project together this summer. Again, it is always good to network because you never know when you will end up working with someone you meet!

Research Findings

Example output script from the Infrared Camera

Time to talk about this weeks research findings. This week, Josh was able to get the some data from the IR camera from running an example script. This was a nice feeling because last week we could not get anything to work. Now, he has possibly found some code that will be able to interact with the IR camera. He is working on trying to implement this code with the IR camera.

DLib Face_detection script and output

I have been working on testing out different computer vision libraries (OpenCV, dlib) that we will be using to execute our project. I first downloaded OpenCV on my Mac and got it installed and compiled. I proceeded to run a test facial detection script. This all worked fine! The next step is to get it configured with the Beaglebone. I got OpenCV working with Beaglebone and the script ran perfectly! Success ! Success! I did some testing (determining how well it picks up faces) with one of my graduate students. He mentioned that I should try to use dlib, due to it being more reliable. Therefore, I downloaded dlib on my Mac and got it configured and ran a sample face detection script. This script worked fine as well. This script was more detailed. It provided the number of faces detected, location of each face, and the GUI component shows the faces it detected. I am now trying to get it compiled and working on the Beaglebone. When trying to run the python examples, there are many other things that have to be installed that take up space. The Beaglebone ran out of space. After trying multiple ways of to condense my space used, I ended up re-flashing my Beaglebone and am now  working on just trying to run c++  face detection library files instead of the ones that are python.