With only two weeks left, students are beginning to prepare their presentations for the Undergraduate Research Symposium on August 8th. Each REU student must give a fifteen minutes presentation on his or her research at the symposium. These presentations will give them an opportunity to experience another aspect of the research process. From their presentations the students will get feedback on their work, receive ideas for potential future research, and create a detailed account of the work they accomplished over the summer. Along with giving a presentation at the end of the summer,

REU students will also be writing papers describing their research and creating scientific posters that they will be able to bring back to their own universities. By sharing their posters, they can spark the interests of others and promote REU programs around the country.

RIT REU reactions:

Planning presentations

“I started working on a paper, which wraps up the whole project.” -Oscar Ding from the Wavefront Sensing with Varying Transmission Filters program

RIT REU Review

July 25th, 2014

Printed, uncured PZT samples from Tyler

Hess’s lab

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RIT REU reactions continued:

July 25th, 2014 RIT REU Review

REU student of the week Oscar Ding Hometown: China School: Wheaton College (MA) Major: Mathematics and Physics Host Lab: Wavefront Sensing Lab Mentor: Mentor: Jie Qiao My name is Gaozan Ding, and I go by the name Oscar. I am a rising Junior and double major in Physics and Mathematics at Wheaton College, near Boston, MA. I am from an east coast city in China, and have been studying here for two years. Basketball is one of my favorite sports, and I also like to working out, swimming, and hiking. Clubs / Activities: Basketball, Texas Holdem

The Insight Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Imaging Science involves the University, Students, and Faculty in developing, delivering, evaluating, and researching cutting edge science education and outreach programs and technologies. The Lab is physically located in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science on the RIT Campus; room 76(CAR)-1150.

Dr. Stefi Baum Email: baum@cis.rit.edu Office: 76-2264 Phone: 585-475-6220

Enjoying the sunshine

“The end of the REU program is approaching quickly. I can’t believe we only have two weeks left, and I am also amazed at the amount of information I have learned in these eight short weeks.” -Julia Savich from the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory

A lily in the coy pond at RIT

James gives the weekly Science of Imaging book

presentation

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Lee Burnette School: Rochester Institute of Technology Major: Applied Mathematics Project name: Investigating the Accuracy and Precision of Eye Trackers The program has been tested on a wide variety of computers and has been found to work with very few problems. The most significant is that it requires XQuartz on Macs to work, but as XQuartz is required by many other programs, many users will already have XQuartz installed. Based on the feedback received, a good number of changes, both minor and significant, have been made. It is now very close to being a completed product that is ready to ship. In the meantime, I have started work on a separate project that I will actually be presenting that is aimed at determining how “messy” a given data set is.

Isaac Axtmann School: Haverford College Major: Physics with the possibility of a Biophysics concentration (2017) Project name: Investigating the Accuracy and Precision of Eye Trackers Correspondence with a few of the experts and a couple high school interns and other REU students at RIT has yielded many bug fixes and performance modifications for the beta version of the data display program. As Lee makes adjustments to the code, I have been keeping track of the major changes such that I can update the instructions page to complement the version of the program that will be used in the actual experiment. I have also begun the process of looking at the preliminary expert preference results (“pilot data”) obtained from sending out the beta version of the program last week. I wrote code that reads in csv files of experts’ preferences and compiles them into a format that will allow the preference data to be grouped in different ways based on various criteria -expert name, eyetracker name, etc. Once I have written something that implements this grouping concept, I can begin looking for trends in the way data is chosen and start getting an idea of how we are going to take preference results and make them useful for the people who will be coding a machine learning algorithm to make similar selections automatically. Update on the Tobii EyeX: using a powered USB 3.0 hub was unsuccessful in solving the intermittent connectivity issues. There is, as of yet, no remedy for this problem.

Oscar Ding School: Wheaton College Major: Physics and Mathematics (2016) Project name: Wavefront Sensing with Varying Transmission Filters This week, I have been adding different kind of noise to my data, and then test my code. For example, I added ‘Poisson’ noise to my original data, whose intensity is 1%. This means, if the original phase value at a point is 100, then the value of the added noise is 1. After a couple tries, the reconstructed wavefront is the same as the original one in spite of the noise effect. We also set the intensity of the noise as 5% and 10%, and our code works pretty well in both case. This means the code is robust. Besides that, I did a lot of alignment with my lab partner Lawren. We collected a bunch of useful data, such as focal spot size at different locations. The experiment has been set up in a pretty precise way. I started working on a paper, which wraps up the whole project. I am still working on it.

July 25th, 2014 RIT REU Review

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Tyler Hess School: Rochester Institute of Technology Major: Chemistry (2015) Project name: PZT Synthesis and Nano Imaging This week research took interesting turns. Upon further investigation into the literature it was found, without any additives the curing range of the PZT is around 1000 to 1200 degrees Celsius ranging anywhere from minutes to hours depending on the type of crystal geometry you want formed. A few samples were placed in the oven gradually increasing the final temperature up to 1025 degrees Celsius. The samples came out black. Under the SEM the samples appeared to be films of nano fibers of PZT. This is a surprising outcome, however under analysis the lead amount was half the amount it should be for PZT. This may be due to the high temperatures which would oxidize the lead and volatilize it. The other issue with these temperatures is the stainless steel substrate begins to oxidize as well leading to poor conductance and not allowing accurate testing for polarization quality. Some samples were only baked at 600 degrees Celsius, this gave what appears to be very smooth and uniform films even under the SEM. The PZT ink was up scaled and used for printing. It was a success in that the printer didn’t clog. Yet once more it was found during the curing process that

the samples still shattered. This is most likely due to the samples simply still being too thick. The PZT may have to be further diluted to get an even lower sol gel fraction. The focus of the following week will be making an ink that allows for films to be printed that are even thinner.

Austin Iovoli School: Susquehanna University Major: Biology and Philosophy (2015) Project name: Eye-Tracking and Virtual Reality

This week included several breakthroughs for my project. After reading several journal articles conducting similar latency tests, I decided to build on a previous design and measure latency through modeling the phase difference between sine waves. To do this I set up my physical disc on a pendulum, which creates constant periodic motion that can be fit to a sine curve. I was successfully able to model this and found the phase difference between the physical and virtual disc fitted sine waves to be a much more accurate and consistent measure of system latency. In addition, I optimized my code to work directly on .avi videos rather than folders containing frame sequences, vastly simplifying the procedure. Further work next week will include final testing, writing my paper, and preparing my oral presentation.

July 25th, 2014 RIT REU Review

Hannah Kavanaugh School: University of Maine at Farmington Major: Individualized Major of Physics and Mathematics (2016) Project name: Multiwave Astrophysics Program This week has been filled with lots of new information. I have been learning new things about PuTTY, IDL, and learning LaTeX. I have transferred my entire paper to LaTeX and taught myself everything I have needed to know. Working with IDL more closely, I have learned where my problems lie and am working on fixing them. I joined an online conference on Wednesday, with people from all over the world who are working on this research. It was very interesting to see the different aspects of this research that are being explored. It was also great to see the real evidence of this research’s progression.

PZT nano fibers cooked at 1025 degrees Celsius Close up of PZT nano fibers

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July 25th, 2014 RIT REU Review

Julia Savich School: Illinois Wesleyan University Major: Physics (2016) Project name: Remote Image Reconstruction of Submerged Objects Implementing the calculated phase shifts from last week proved to be very challenging, and writing new coordinates for each of the 40,000 pixels in the image put my programming skills to the test. I came across some small errors that resulted in “corrected” images that looked significantly worse than the distorted ones. After carefully

combing through my code, I found these mistakes and fixed them. With each correction, the final image grew closer and closer to the expected result. Glint removal was the most crucial modification I made. As pictured: a single glint pixel appeared as an outlier compared to the rest of the pixels in each of the RGB arrays. The glint pixel adjusted the brightness scale so drastically that there was no visible difference between the water and the disk, but once I applied a mask to remove glint pixels I could clearly see the disk separated from the water. Next week, I hope to fix any remaining bugs, and as a research team, we plan on going out into the field to collect physical data.

Miranda Thompson School: Harvey Mudd College Major: Physics (2016) Project name: Planetary Nebula I talked to my mentor, Joel Kastner, and figured out how to correct my measurements of the magnitudes. My new values are much closer to those listed in the archives. I am now comparing several methods of measuring the magnitude to find out which one has the least error. I also attended several SHAPE workshops, where I learned about the astronomy modeling program they created.

James Wheaton School: City College of New York Major: Earth and Atmospheric Sciences/ Geology B.S. (2015) Project name: Wildfire Growth Patterns Unfortunately I was sick for the majority of this weekend. My days were spent trying to get better until Thursday, when I went back into work. We had a phone call with other scientists to determine what other data we need in this project. We’re refining the data so that we have quantitative reasons for the decisions we made. For example, we (last week) ran a single slide with multiple thresholds. We measured the kurtosis and skewness of each threshold as well as visually looked at what the computer considered “fire.” We’re going to continue with our work and start with the wildfire data.

Glint pixel

With glint mask

Without glint mask

Created by: Julia Savich