First day in the books! After struggling with parking for well beyond the 10 min we had given ourselves as a buffer, Suki and I arrived at the 5th floor of NCSU’s Statistics Department. We met with Dr. Eric Laber, a statistics professor who is involved in so many interesting endeavors on and off campus. He led us to a conference room where he gave a presentation on what we’d be doing for the next couple weeks and the vast amounts of applications for statistics, specifically adaptive algorithms (computer programs that learn from each previous run/action and can compile that data and be able to decide more optimal actions), with projects such as chess-playing robots whose code could be cross-applied to identifying individuals involved human trafficking, fighting the AIDS/HIV and Ebola crises through precision medicine (providing the right treatment at the right time to the right patient at the right dose to maximize resource potential), and so many other crazy complicated schemes that I couldn’t wrap my head around. It wasn’t even midday and I was already mentally exhausted. He gave us a tour of campus before taking us to BOM (Bureau of Mines) where his research facility, Laber Labs, works out of. There we met Alison Wu, a graduate student from China who will be working at Apple starting September. We helped her manually program Nona, the chess-playing robot we’d heard so much about, by replicating the actions given by a program on a physical chess set to 100 actions and taking pictures of each specific move. She explained this would help Nona compile a library of images to develop a clearer grasp of each chess piece, rather than just working with online 3D models. In total, Suki and I completed almost 800 actions – phew. While tedious, we understood how important the work was- plus, we were rewarded with ice cream from NCSU’s famous Howling Cow! I’m excited to learn more about the rest of the team which consists of people from statistics to industrial design majors and helping them out with their respective projects. On to the next day…
