Luke and I both arrived at NC State this morning ready to meet Dr. Laber for the first time. After some very frustrating parking confusion, we found a public parking deck and made our way to the statistics department. He met us, then we got an hour long presentation on Laber Labs, what they do, their mission, various projects they’ve done, and an overview of basic statistics terms and concepts that were quite confusing. After that, Dr. Laber walked us around campus to show us the dining options, coffee shops, the space where we would do most of our work (The BOM, Bureau of Mines), and various facilities Dr. Laber likes to hang out at. After the tour we got about an hour to eat some lunch and relax a little bit before heading over to the BOM to meet Allison Wu, a graduate student working on a project with chess to help combat human trafficking. She was working on creating a lot of images of chess boards to create and develop a software to identify underaged people who might be at risk or in the process of being trafficked. Allison was very nice and showed us all the ins and outs of her project. We helped her use her software to take images of the chess set with Nona, the chess-playing robot she had set up. After working with her, eating some Howling Cow ice cream, and continuing to help her out with her project Louie and Eric took us over to their Makerspace where they housed lots of 3-d printers. They showed us the setup and something that they were 3-d printing for a project right at that moment which was neat.
