Tag: STEM

Day 1: Laber Labs

The three of us had a great first day at Laber Labs! 

In the morning, we started by working on a quiz that compared a statistician to an inanimate object, with our statistician being David Blackwell and we decided on a spatula being our inanimate object, and we did research to come up with some questions for both. 

In the afternoon, we created levels for a game called Zombies on Treadmills with Danny Schmidt and Sasha Chirova (two game designers at Laber Labs) and experimented with the different map sizes for levels. Some of my level designs include Pikachu and E.T. for the Atari.

Andrew- Day 2 at Intuitive

Today at Intuitive Tymur, Rohen, and I spent the morning learning more about electrical engineering. We had a crash course in electrical engineering and electronics- learning about circuits, voltage, resistors, and more. We then worked on our soldering skills as we assembled a simple circuit that functioned as a power supply that read the voltage output. In the afternoon Tymur and Rohen continued their work with electronics while I was introduced with a build design challenge. The challenge is to design a cantilever beam (think of a diving board) that can withstand 50 pounds of force from a 1/2 inch rod, 2.5 inches away from it’s mounting point. I then spent the rest of today working in CAD on coming up with my first design for this challenge. Something that fascinated me today was the power of circuit diagrams in being able to convey information about a circuit.

Lenovo

Through endless string of calls, today’s adventures began. From staff meetings to project work there was never a dull moment in the scheme of learning something new about how a company functions. The funniest moment came from when we had to change conference rooms for a meeting since someone was using the one we had prior we were faced with our biggest challenge… old technology. After we got teams sorted out from our echoing situation we found the struggle of cameras moving to noise and movement. While Mr. Lancia was explaining to his team about their project with Amazon Alexa we found the camera to only zoomed in on me instead of him which made me feel like part of their world.

Intro Post

Today is the first day that I shadowed with Sophia Rowland, a data scientist from SAS. After a brief introductory meeting via Teams, I was introduced to the project that I will be working on for the next two weeks.

As a software company, SAS takes data from customers and creates models from it, which can be used to deduce patterns and predict future outcomes. Under my specific placement, I will be involved with something called ModelOps, which encompasses all the processes for using, managing, monitoring, and updating models.

However, SAS isn’t the only company that does this for consumers. My job is to research SAS’s competitors and their ModelOps processes and determine the benefits and challenges of them, especially from the consumer perspective.

I spent the rest of the day researching more about the ModelOps process, what companies use it, and sat in meetings with Ms. Rowland’s team.

Andrew- Day 1 at Intuitive

Today at Intuitive, Rohen, Tymur, and I worked together and spent our day working with Intuitive’s Da Vinci surgical robot. In the morning we spent our time learning about the functions of the Da Vinci robot, then we spent time operating the machine. I was amazed in the precision of the machine and how it could be used to complete complex tasks with easy. The robot was surprisingly not that complex to operate as well. With only 20 minutes of practice I was able to tie knots in rope, using the machine. In the afternoon we visited Intuitive’s building in RTP where they take old model Da Vinci robots from hospitals, and upgrade them to newest models with the latest technology.

Day 1: Wind tunnel, Silent Room

Today we worked with Joe to observe a wind tunnel, visited vibration labs, and acoustic rooms designed to help reduce noise in aeronautical structures. The vibration lab helped display how different materials respond to sound and other factors, such as stress and pressure.

Within the wind tunnel, we observed how it worked, through diffusers and fans and propellers. The wind tunnel was “subsonic” which means that it has a max speed of around Mach .4, and is relatively stable. NC State also has a wind tunnel of Mach ~2.3, and that is their supersonic wind tunnel, but it is incredibly loud.

Lenovo

Instead of arriving at the the usual 9:00 AM like the rest of the days, today I arrived at 11:00 AM in order for Mr. Lancia to have everything needed for me set up. After calling up to meet my boss for the week we realized there was something wrong. Even after a conformation email from the security office saying I was in the system, we still found issues due to old computers (Shocking I know as we were in a tech company building who created computers). After a long journey across the lake to get my pass we finally made it to the office to get down to business. From learning about working in an office to being delegated work today has truly opened my eyes to a whole new world.

Lenovo – Day 0

Tomorrow Leo and I begin our 2-week journey with Lenovo’s consumer product management team. While unsure what I will be contributing, I look forwards to meeting Lenovo employees and learning about Lenovo’s various consumer markets.

Here’s a graphic on agile design, something that Leo and I did research on in anticipation for our time at Lenovo.Agile Methodology in System Development source: Okeke(2021), retrieved... | Download Scientific Diagram

Enjoy tomorrow, Kaeshev

Day 0: Laber Labs

I’m extraordinarily grateful to Dr. Eric Laber and Laber Labs for agreeing to host us for our Work Experience Program. According to their website, Laber Labs is “a statistics lab dedicated to the development of practical and mathematically rigorous methodology for data-driven decision making”. Laber Labs has been working on many projects, including precision medicine to tailor treatment decisions based on the characteristics of each individual patient, spatio-temporal reinforcement learning to inform the management of emerging and persistent infectious diseases, and adversarial decision making to understand the decision making process of two agents whose goals are either imperfectly aligned or completely at odds. I’m excited to see what awaits me in this program.

Vikram

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