Update

Started research with a new professor today! His name is Dr. Chris Longmore and he is a Cognitive psychologist. His research is quite a bit different from Dr. Large's. It's a face-recognition study, focusing on how we encode faces - portrait-wise or a 3 dimensional encoding.

My first session for Dr. Large was scheduled on Thursday, which is a pretty busy class day, so I only got to see how they set up the EKG cap. I was able to see the read-out for the EKG for was while too and learn the different brain-wave patterns and what they mean.

It sounds like I'm going to have more of a prominent role with Dr. Longmore's research, where I will be running all the sessions and helping with analysis. I'm excited but nervous about this, hopefully I won't screw up the math portion of the study!!

Also, a student was meeting with Dr. Longmore when I came in for our meeting who asked me to answer a few questions for his dissertation project. His research is pretty interesting as he has Asperger's syndrome and is double majoring in Computer Science and Psychology. His intentions are to create a computer program that is able to see through/understand ambiguity, when he, himself, cannot. The program was a bit hard to understand, but I think I got the jist of it: it will involve a driver's description of a car ride and the program will be able to simulate the occurence. This may sound easy, but if you start to consider the ambiguity of language it becomes intuitively more difficult. Think of the description "the road was bumpy" or "the car was swerving". There are both extremes and minor occurrences of these ambiguous descriptions. A computer is left dumbfounded with the 'thought' of "how bumpy was the road" or "how much did the car actually swerve". It will be incredibly interesting if he can create said program. The interview was interesting as well with the combined factors of his questions about ambiguity and the symptoms of his condition.

My free-time has run out and I need to go to class...

Until next time!
~M