4

O n Day 1 of COS-

MOS, Cluster 1

had not only got-

ten a glimpse of what was in store

for the next four weeks, but creat-

ed an Android app! During this

first week, we began to learn Ap-

pInventor. It is a scripting language

with a graphical interface which

allowed us to

put together

our simple app

in a matter of

hours. AppIn-

ventor allows

us to develop

applications for

Android based

devices, like

cell phones.

Some of our

first applications for the Android

phone include: PaintPot (drawing

and painting application), and A

Mole Mash game (similar to

Whack-a-Mole). Next we worked

on our own unique app with our

partner. If we wanted to, we could

put our apps up for sale in the An-

droid Market! We were paired up

in teams and made a group app

which we we will present on

Thursday afternoon to the cluster.

In about three days, we had creat-

ed an app and could see what oth-

er features we still had to work

on.

On Wednesday, we prac-

ticed number conversions be-

tween differ-

ent bases.

Then we

played

“Around the

World”

where Prof.

Kastner

showed us a

flash card with

a binary num-

ber on it and

we had to give the hexadecimal

equivalent. The “winner” was the

one who could go around the

room against each person and re-

turn to their seat – therefore go-

ing around the world. Jesse came

out on top and won – with Izabel-

la at a close second behind! Dur-

ing lab, we finished up working on

our apps and continued to discov-

er the possibilities and limitations

of working on a mobile platform.

Thursday we heard a presentation

from the Science and Engineering

librarian that will help us do our

research for our upcoming work.

In the afternoon, we’ll present our

work to our cluster. The presen-

tations will be available on our blog

- http://ucsdcosmoscluster1-

2015.blogspot.com/.

We will also begin working on

Scribbler Robots during lab. We

can’t wait to begin to get our ro-

bots to obey our every command!

Friday will be our Robot

Dance-Off! Videos of our dancing

Scribblers will be posted this

weekend on our blog.

CLUSTER 1 : COMPUTERS IN EVERYDAY L IFE Cluster 1: http://ucsdcosmoscluster1-2015.blogspot.com/

4

We ended last in the lab

working on our Scribbler Dance pro-

jects. We quickly became engrossed

in making our designs perfect but

learned that they didn’t always behave

the way we thought they would. We

discovered that the battery strength

sometimes played a role in the execu-

tion as did the surface our Scribblers

drove on. We learned to adapt and

become comfortable with Python (the

language we program our Scribblers

with). We presented our final Danc-

ing Scribbler Friday afternoon. Our

demos can be found on our blog at

ucsdcosmoscluster1-

2015.blogspot.com. Congratulations

to Guillermo and Izabella for having

the best dance!

On Monday and Wednesday,

we learned about image processing.

We learned how programs like paint

and Photoshop do some of their basic

functionality like finding a color and

changing it to another or clearing the

screen. We discovered how to do

some image processing functions in

Python – which means we’ll be able to

do it with the Scribblers! Currently,

we are trying to get our Scribbler to

traverse a maze, identify the colors

and if a vertical or horizontal line is

present. We’ve learned that the cam-

eras on our Scribblers don’t always

seem to present the exact color

shade we expect and we had to adjust

for that. Also, textures and shadows

give off different shades of blue (for

example), so we can’t just use one

single definition of blue. To get our

Scribblers to recognize (and com-

municate appropriately) vertical and

horizontal our code had to analyze

the pixels and perform calculations.

Monday afternoon we fin-

ished up our RoboArt. We pro-

grammed our Scribblers to draw

what we wanted on a large piece of

paper. You can view the photos on

our blog. Congratulations to

Shamailah and Shreya for their awe-

some snowflake design!

On Wednesday afternoon,

we took a field trip to ViaSat. Sonali

shares her experience: “Our field trip

began with an informative presenta-

tion about ViaSat and the projects

they are currently working on. Niko-

lai Devereaux, our tour guide,

showed us models of the new ViaSat-

2 satellite that is supposed to be

launched in 2016. The difference be-

tween the new satellite and the previ-

ous one, that is currently orbiting the

Earth at "low earth orbit," is the in-

ternet speed is five times faster and

double the capacity of people or de-

vices that can be connected. After

making deals with JetBlue, United Air-

lines, and just last week signing on

Virgin America, ViaSat has wi-fi cover-

age over 95% of the United States.

After learning about ViaSat's commer-

cial programs and government/military

projects, we saw the networking de-

vices that connect all the flights of

JetBlue on their server. Lastly, we

were able to view the devices and

modems that software, computer, and

mechanical engineers are testing for

their new project. In conclusion, we

were exposed to so many types of

engineering and how they all come

together to create a network, which

was very inspiring to us young engi-

neers. “

At the end of the week, we’ll

start our Arduino labs and submit our

ethics essay for the contest. It’s been

a busy, challenging and fun week!

CLUSTER 1 : COMPUTERS IN EVERYDAY L IFE Cluster 1: http://ucsdcosmoscluster1-2015.blogspot.com/

6

Last Friday, we had a guest speaker, Diba Mirza, who spoke to us about data

compression. We knew it happened on our computers and other devices, but never quite knew how. She taught us about Huffman codes and how fewer bits are used to store

information using that algorithm compared to non-compressed data. On Monday, we learned about adding binary numbers using adders. As a cluster,

we added two 19-bit binary numbers together. Each one of us was a digit and we used what we learned about sum and carry bits to accomplish the task. Did you know that all

the following are true: 1 + 1 = 0, 1 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2 and 1 + 1 = 10? We did. And we know why. Later that morning, Sanjay Dasgupta guest spoke about algorithms and how

they determine which ones are “good” (more efficient) or “bad” (less efficient). While there are thousands upon thousands of problems out there, most can be reduced down

to a much smaller subset of algorithms. For example, the cartographer’s problem of col-or coding a map with the fewest number of colors while having neighboring countries

have different colors is really a graph color problem. Another graph color problem is exam scheduling – using as few time slots as possible but not scheduling two exams for

one person at the same time. In the afternoon, we continued to work on our musical instrument Arduino project. We became adept at circuits and got some new parts that we could include – like push buttons. You can see videos of us playing our instruments on

our blog. The top musical instrument projects were made by Sheldon and Lizbeth, and Veronica and Matthew.

On Tuesday, we began working on our walking Arduino robot. Each team has a different idea on how to get theirs to move around the room. We can use Kinex, popsi-

cle sticks, and zip ties. It’s been a challenge, but a lot of fun and one we are facing head-on. We’ll present our walking robots on Thursday.

Wednesday, Gert Lanckriet came in to speak to us about building a music search engine. We heard about the evolution of how suggestions are given in Pandora, iTunes

music store, etc. Gert’s research is working on entering other terms in a search such as mellow, romantic, dance, saxophone, etc. His lab is also working on going “zero-click” so

that your phone’s music player can know what to play based on your “mood”. For exam-ple, if you were working out, trying to going to sleep, on a date, it would play the appro-

priate music without you typing anything into the player. His lab has not only graduate and undergraduate students but he welcomes high school students to work on the re-

search as well! Afterwards, our professor Ryan Kastner, shared some of the work that Explorers for Engineering (E4E) is doing. Ryan and Curt (our faculty) are also co-directors of E4E. Any misconception that computer scientists and engineers just sit in a lab in front

of a computer was smashed when he shared with us their work which took them to plac-es like nature reserves, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic – just to name a few.

They went to Guatemala to map out ancient Maya tombs and create 3-D models of it. They will soon 3-D print these models and share them.

Another fascinating project he shared was a “camera trap” to get pictures of ani-mals in their natural habitat. There are challenges that they face in putting a camera out in

the wild such as power. The devices can’t be plugged in and re-charging them frequently is unreasonable. The camera traps turn on when it “sees” an animal and continue to track

its movements. In the afternoon, we got a chance to meet some of the students who are working on this research and see the technology first-hand.

We’ll finish off the week with a visit to CalIT2 and start work on our final projects. It’s been a busy and challenging week. We’re going to make the best of the final week of

COSMOS!

CLUSTER 1 : COMPUTERS IN EVERYDAY L IFE Cluster 1: http://ucsdcosmoscluster1-2015.blogspot.com/

 4 

A lot happened at the end of last week. Last Thursday, we finished up our walking robots and had varying levels of success – moving fast/slow or it moves through air!

Leo Porter came to speak to us about multi-core processors. We learned that more processors doesn’t necessarily mean a faster computer. It’s important to know what the tasks are and how to appropriately “schedule” them. Friday afternoon we had the opportunity to tour CalIT2 where Curt’s lab is located and Engineers for Exploration (E4E) does their research as well. We visited the Visualization lab which had a tiled display of monitors. We got to “fly through” 3-D represen-tations of buildings and towns. It was as if we were at the Maya temple. Next was the Audio Spatialization lab (Spat lab). It had twenty-four speakers around the room, and we heard the difference between playing the rain on all 24 speakers with and without pro-cessing. Once the sound was pro-cessed, it sounded more realistic. They also had an array of speakers which beamed sounds. Depending on where you stood, you’d get a different

CLUSTER 1 : COMPUTERS IN EVERYDAY L IFE Cluster 1: http://ucsdcosmoscluster1-2015.blogspot.com/

sound. Also, the speaker array could send different sounds to each ear and make it sound like someone was talk-ing on one side and someone was getting a haircut on the other side. Very realistic! Monday we attended a lec-ture by a Jim Trezzo, who spoke about Open ROVs (Remotely Operat-ed Vehicles) which are deployed in the water with a range of sensors that allow it to be useful in many fields. They can be used not only for under-water observations but specimen col-lection, ocean health monitoring, ma-rine archeology and vision systems. The majority of this week, we focused on our final projects. We got

to propose our own final project and get it approved. It had to involve Ap-pInventor, Scribbler Robots or Ardu-inos. After many hours of hard work and some laughs at the weird things our programs would do, we are just about done with many of the mile-stones in our projects. A couple groups are working with AppInventor to implement ideas from needs they saw around them. Some teams took on the challenge to use both Scribblers and Arduinos together! They used sen-sors on both technologies to interact with each other. Others are having AppInventor, Scribbler and Arduino communicate together in their pro-ject. There are many ways to apply the engineering and science from our

final projects to larger robots. Some of us hope to continue to work on our projects after COSMOS and sub-mit it to a science competition this coming school year, such as a science fair. We look forward to sharing our projects with everyone on closing day.

Our faculty was thoroughly impressed with our projects and it was difficult for them to select the Gordon Leadership Award winners for our cluster. The videos of our final presen-tations will be available on our blog. We would really like to thank all those that helped make our cluster and COS-MOS experience one we’ll never forget. From faculty (Professor Ryan Kastner and

Professor Curt Schurgers) to our TAs (Lucy, Luis and Khelsey) to our RAs (Mara and Josh), you helped us learn a lot and have a great time in the pro-cess!