Summer and Fall 2010 + SURF 2010

So, 4 days into this semester I think I have decided my schedule. I am assuming I have a relatively light semester owing to some stupidity I engaged in (screw ups with the coursework). Anyway, here’s my coursework for this semester:

• CS 352 – Compilers (supposed to be hard)
• CS 314 – Numerical Methods (this course looked very interesting).
• MA 375 – Discrete Math (to consolidate my probability concepts and to study graphs deeply)
• COM 217 – Had to take it sometime.
• CS 490 – Bioinformatics independent study.

So, I chickened out of ECE 270 since Compilers + Digital Systems would be suicide and since CS 497 is planned for semester #6, I am in a tight spot since one more CS course can cause my GPA in all courses to tank so I am stuck here with this stupid setup. Also, I took the Phy test out and I am not sure if that went very well so I will have to wait.

Anyway, enough about the current semester. Summer was the most eventful time of my 2 years here @ Purdue. First, I worked for Dr. David S. Ebert in his Visualization laboratory (PURPL) on an emergency response system (the project screenshots shown there are still old. They probably won’t be updated in a while). It was extremely interesting since I got to work with OpenGL (I am not sure I will ever get a chance to work with it again) and got to learn about computer graphics. Here is a list of things we got done in the summer:

• A 3D picking algorithm (nothing too fancy. This took a while since I had to read OpenGL documentation about their coordinate systems).
• A controllable camera (one you can turn, zoom in/out with using keystrokes)
• A couple of camera angles (The high angle mode and the first person mode). Getting them to follow characters smoothly was a crazy issue.
• Then we implemented a path based attribute visualization technique which became the topic for my poster.

I stood with a poster @ the SURF symposium and I won “Top Poster” and my grad mentor, S. Kim, earned “Graduate Student Mentor of the Summer” so I would rate my SURF 2010 experience as one of the top 10 experiences of my life (the other 9 are yet to arrive).

Now, I might just go and join SIG-APP or something like that to spend spare time. Now, here are some goals I set for myself this semester:

• Prepare for the GRE (it sucks but it has to be done).
• Learn how to speak Japanese reasonably well.
• Consolidate my probability knowledge (I would really like to learn it well this time round).
• Finish reading a book on NP Complete problems.

Well, I just hope I don’t screw up anything this year since this is my last chance to build a great resume for grad school (and achieve some lofty goals which are too childish for even this blog) before applications season begins.