Journal

Last Thursday, we met with Ethan Abbasi, Dr. Hassibi's soon-to-be Ph.D. graduate, to discuss our project on semi-crowdsourced clustering. He needed little time to understand our project and dataset which meant that we could get right into possible algorithms. The first one that was mentioned was "Spectral Clustering", one that was extensively researched last semester, and Ethan gave us advice like adding matrixes together to achieve cliques. He also had us think about performance metrics (a way to measure the success of an algorithm). Two metrics we thought of were mathematical representations of false positives and false negatives. In the last attempt to brainstorm algorithms, we brought up min-cut. However, as demonstrated by Ethan, without understanding convex optimization, min-cut would be very inefficient.

A photo of topics we have discussed during our meeting with Ethan

This weekend during robotics, the programming team, including myself, has successfully implemented a working autonomous mode. Here were the challenges that we had to overcome: drive back, actually getting autonomous to run, get the feeder to run, and time shots. Driving back was fairly simple. The line of code was new Drive(m_driveTrain, 0.5).withTimeout(2). To get auto to run, we have a SendableChooser<Command> which allows the drive team to select an auto mode from ShuffleBoard. We then created a Command m_shootBack which was essentially a SequentialCommandGroup. During testing, we ran into the issue of the feeder belt not running. It was resolved with the following line: m_feeder.feederControl(m_feedInput); To make sure the shooter had enough time to rev up to full speed, we used a Timer.

An outdated but viable video of autonomous in FRC


Above are two pieces of the autonomous code

Earlier today, I got into a fascination with Expedia's youtube channel. As I near my junior year and time between now and college decisions, I have thought heavily on whether I should study abroad for my major. While it is very prominent that the U.S. is light years ahead of other countries in terms of Artificial Intelligence, I would still like to visit other countries for fun. Places that I have thought about are the following: Germany, Japan, France, and Korea. These countries are making efforts to advance themselves in AI which might be super interesting to be apart of. It's because of the considerations that I have watched a handful of videos talking about the countries. One city that caught my eye was Busan in South Korea which features a religious temple that resides by the ocean. The video for it is attached below:


Also in my head, I recently came across a New York Times article talking about how has the economy been affected by the Coronavirus. Companies located in countries affected/affiliated with the virus have shown a decrease in revenue. Big companies, like Microsoft and Apple, are better equipped for such pandemics but have still shown signs of lowered stocks. However, small organizations have suffered in numerously. In a relevant example, the company CurryHouse has had to close all of its California locations. More locally, the CurryHouse in Little Tokyo has broken my friends' hearts like Scott Ulrich, an avid customer there. Below is an article from the NYT:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/opinion/coronavirus-economy-recession.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage 

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