Day XXXIII:

Today was a little more relaxed. I didn't have football practice in the afternoon and I had already told my coach that I would be able to make the morning practice. I worked on what I was going to say during my presentation a little bit and tried to tried to make sure that I wasn't missing anything important. All of the interns met today in the fishbowl for pizza before our practice presentations. I ate too much. Overall the presentations were pretty good. Joe Pow gave me some good insights into what I should tweak or say during my presentation. I'm still a little nervous. It has been a very fun and informative summer.

Day XXXII:

Today I got in and went to the Remote Sensing Hawaiian Luau. I showed up at the very end of the event and got to roast marshmallows. I finished my presentation and turned it into Joe for a review. I hope that there are not too many mistakes or red flags that I may need to correct. The presentation is coming up fast. I can not believe how fast the summer has gone. Tomorrow I will come in in the morning just to make sure that everything is done and ready to be presented. Football is complicating this week a lot and has made me very tired.

Day XXXI:

I am pretty exhausted. When I came in today after practice, Bob showed me a video made by Joe's son. It was really well made and pretty spooky at the same time. I have to put some final touches on my presentation and also show it to Dr. Dube for a review but other than that I am pretty much finished. I also looked at more X-Ray data and SOHO images from a couple days ago. I ended up finding more things that I could incorporate into my presentation. I hope that it won't be too long.

Day XXX:

This is going to be a tiring week. I have double sessions for football so in the morning Monday through Wednesday I will got to football from 8:30-11:00 and then go home, take a shower, eat, and come to RIT. And for the night session I will leave RIT and then go to football at 5:30-8:00. I am going to be sleeping well.

But besides the tiredness factor, I was able to work on my presentation today. I will hopefully be finished by tomorrow. I also need to plan out what I am going to say in more detail just to be sure that I don't miss anything. I'm a little nervous but definitely excited.

Day XXIX:

Today I came at 8:50 because we didn't have a morning staff meeting and I took too long of a shower. I worked on my presentation for a little while and then went to the undergraduate research symposium and listened to a presention on a game designed for facebook. It was a lot different than I expected. Afterward I went back to my building and continued to work. I went back later in the day to see Caitlin and Becky's presentations/posters. They both did very good jobs. There were a lot of other cool research projects, even ones that were not part of the imaging science department.

Day XXVIII:

There was a lot of work done on my final presentation today. I decided, after consulting Dr. Dube, that I should focus more on the Neural Network aspect of the presentation and explain some of the applications to Coronal Mass Ejections at the end. Dr. Dube also said that I should talk about future research that needs to be done. I am making many custom media elements for my talk including a very brief movie that shows the feedforward process. There are still many things to be done.

Today I also continued my look into the X-Ray data. There is a ton to look through but so far it appears to be a good indicator that a CME is occurring. I still need to look at other data sources to see if they show similar trends.

Day XXVII:

I did a couple of interesting things today. For one, I made a movie about how a neural network produces an output, and no I was not action packed. It took me most of the morning to complete since I had to create all of the images that I needed (from scratch) and then convert them into the correct format so that I could use them in windows movie maker. Then I had to get the timing correct for each image. Overall I achieved the task that I had set out to do; I made a simple explanation of how the feedforward process in a neural network works. After this task I went out to lunch. The college of science was having a picnic and, since I forgot my lunch, I was more than happy to attend. The food was delicious; I had a burger and a hot dog.

At 1:30 the whole internship crew went on a field trip to the George Eastman House to get a behind the scenes look at the preservation and analysis of Daguerreotypes. Some of the techniques used were indeed pretty cool, such as the X-Ray pulse analysis that helps determine the type to material. I just wish that we got to see more of everything that was there, no just the Daguerrotype work.

Day XXVI:

Today I started planning out my presentation. I not sure what the scope of it should be so I probably will have to cut some stuff out or change my focus. As of right now my topic is "The Application of Neural Networks to the prediction of Coronal Mass Ejections". I don't think that I will be able to both explain how Neural Networks work, and how their attributes can help in the prediction of the onset of a Coronal Mass Ejection. I may have to only talk about Neural Networks or the prediction of CMEs.

I also played some more Call of Duty today for the Visual Perception lab's experiment. The eye tracker apparently was not working but they let me play anyway. It is a fun game.

Another CME has been projected to hit the earth tonight. There have been a series of events beginning earlier this month that have all made an impact here on Earth. The most surprising part about this is that we are not necessarily being hit by the biggest bursts. For instance, the sun may have one large explosion followed by a much smaller one. As common knowledge would have it, the larger CME would be the one hitting the Earth but I guess that is not the case. Another part of this project now is to determine not only when a CME is occurring but also if a CME will actually make contact with the Earth. I still don't understand how we are supposed to determine the trajectory of a CME just from the two dimensional images provided by the LASCO C2 sensor.

Day XXV:

I was very capricious in my work today. From 9 to 12 I did some more work looking at X-Rays spikes and their relation to CME events. After lunch, Piyush took me, Cicely, and Kevin over to the Computer Engineering and Computer Science departments just to take a look around and explain how things happen at RIT. It was pretty interesting hearing all of the various fields of Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

Afterward I went to the Visual Perception to partake in their experiment. I basically got to play Call Of Duty for an hour while they tracked my eye movements. It was fun.

After that I saw Bob and Dan in the hall moving tables and equipment. I decided to help. Apparently they are converting a computer lab into a workshop in order to make room for more graduate students. I didn't exactly understand why they didn't just turn the computer lab into offices and leave the original workshop (the one that we were moving all the equipment from) alone. We had to transport a lot of heavy equipment from the first floor to the second. This required a lot of brute force. I'm probably going to help them again tomorrow.

Day XXIII:

I was at the computer almost all day today, but I got through a lot of data. From what I have found there seems to be a pretty decent correlation between X-Ray spikes and CME events. While the idea is not perfect and still needs some more support, the X-ray flux spike and CME almost happen simultaneously, with the X-ray spike happening just before the actual event. So far there are many exceptions to the rule, especially during times of increased CME activity, but it could possibly be a good forecast that a CME is occurring. I took a brief look at other types of data and there are similar trends but they need to be explored further.

I also continued working on the GUI for my model Neural Network today. I decided to break it up into different windows as opposed to everything being in the same window, creating clutter. I hope I can actually get it to work.

Day XXII:

Today I spent more time working on trying to find correlations in the recent CME data and past events. It is very up and down. At one time there might appear to be a trend in the data, such as a spike or a pattern, but it will not match up with data from other times. Caitlin, Becky, and I met with Dr. Dube to discuss our findings. Some of the data we need is very specific and hard to find because certain sensors or satellites did not exist at the time of older events. Nonetheless I found a database that contains a lot of X-Ray and other sun data.

When looking at the data, it is just as important (in theory) to find the things that don't match up with a CME event because that way erroneous data need not be entered into the Neural Network, making the Network run faster.

I listened to another Ph.D dissertation today and it was just as over my head as the first one I listened to. There were a lot of references to certain software and techniques that I had never heard of before, so my understanding of the topic beyond the general goals was very limited.

Day XXI:

Today Becky, Caitlin, and I went to be stand-ins for a photo shoot for someone. We were there for two hours and now my face hurts. Afterward we went to Dr. Dube's office where he told us about a CME that occured on august 1 and has been predicted to hit the earth on August 4th. We now are trying to take a look at different possible indicators of the CME such as X-ray flux or sunspot density. It is hard to determine if there is a correlation. For instance, the X-ray flux before the CME happens to have a large spike in intensity. But when looking at former events the X-ray flux does not always point to a CME event.

On a side note, the fire alarms went off today in the building.

Starting Day + 19:

Today I did some more coding and debugging of my neural network and started designing a user interface for it, mostly for my own benefit so I can better see what errors are going on in my program. It will be fun and interesting to create something that is not pure text.

I also went to the Scube today (I'm not sure how it is spelled). It was not in working order but it was cool nonetheless. The idea is that a person can become completely immersed in a computer generated environment. Four projectors cast images onto each of the four vertical sides of the cube, creating interactions that are three dimensional. There were some technical difficulties but at least I got to understand the ultimate goal.