David Alvarez, Entry #1: Week 1 = Done!

My first week here at the Wireless and Mobile Networking Lab at Columbia University has been busier than I expected, but the work I'm doing here is truly fascinating me. First of all, the commute to Columbia from Hightstown every day has been rough, but is getting better. I have to wake up at 6 AM sharp every day to get my stuff together so I can drive over to the Princeton Junction train station, where I take the express to New York Penn Station. From there, I take the subway uptown until I get to the campus, where I only need to walk a few minutes to get to my lab. The first day's commute was awful, but I'm slowly getting more used to it. I've used the time productively, and have now finally beat level 93 of Candy Crush. Anyway, onto the actual lab work.

My first day was conveniently the same day that Dr. Gil Zussman's team was having a meeting to go over a couple of presentations that will be going to a big conference in a few weeks. Afterward, I got to meet the two PhD students I will be working with during my time here, Varun and Craig. They sent me off with an undergrad student Andy and a graduate student Bohan so that I could get caught up with what's going on in the lab. They gave me a list of software programs and programming languages to get familiar with, which included GitHub, node.js, and C++. At first it seemed intimidating, but they've both been friendly and taken all my questions, no matter how dumb they might have seemed. Varun set me up at my own desk where I have plenty of space to work.

My workspace

The past few days, I have been working more on another project that Varun introduced me to called WebRTC. What this essentially is is understanding and improving real-time web communication between two separate machines in the audiovisual sense, using a lot of the software developed by the Adaptive Multicast Systems project. I've set up a simple experiment that involves two machines enabled with audiovisual communication, with one streaming a video that we had to program in as a substitute for the computer's camera. The data we've gotten has given us some very interesting results. It's been split into Rx and Tx metrics, with Rx representing the audio data and Tx representing the video data. Within these two, the five key metrics are data rate, FPS, Frame Width, RTT, and packet loss. We've set up several different scenarios in order to get a good feeling for the true power of both the software and the Access Point that we've set up in the lab.

Access Point that's been programmed with the SSH software

Overall, my first week in the lab has been great. I'm definitely being kept busy, but there is still a very friendly environment here. Andy and Bohan have given me a lot of advice about the college process and me and Craig have gotten to know each other both through talking about sports and being from the same area (he's from central NJ too). I'm looking forward both to discovering more through our research and getting to know New York City well!