Peddie 2016 EXP: Trevor Russo, Week #7: An Internship in Review

Now I am not writing this from Pittsburgh, but rather back at home on the couch while the Olympics are on. I am writing this last blog entry more as a retrospective on my whole time, since the blog itself only encompasses 3 days. Now to get to those three days. On Wednesday I was greeted at noon by Chris Fu and his family, who were visiting CMU. I took them to the Union Grill, where Chris tried and succeeded to eat the massive burger they famously had. On the coding side, after writing the masking program, the next step for me was to write a program that applies a white balance to the photos, to presumably make them look better for modeling. This was a lot more difficult than I or Venkat had anticipated, as he assumed that OpenCV, a library for image manipulation, would contain tools for this, but the only such tool was a cpp file called white_balance.cpp. So I did what every reasonable programmer would do and ripped the code straight from the file, making sure to include the right header files, before compiling. Unfortunately, I got the worst error of all from the compiler: the dreaded Segmentation Error. The reason that this is the worst kind of error is because it doesn't even tell you what line of code caused the error. And since it was my last day, I didn't want to spend it debugging. So I told Venkat the problem, and he agreed that it would be something that I could work on afterwards. So instead, I focused on writing a report which would allow any future interns or Venkat to make their own models. And finally, my last task at the lab involved hooking up a USB camera to the computer and testing out my Kinect capture program. It worked, but with the added caveat of not being able to save the photos in the folder I wanted them to be saved in. After that little problem, and with the added fact that my dad would be arriving in a few minutes to the house, I decided to pack it up. I backed up all my code to GitHub, and said my goodbyes to Venkat and Karthik, who were the only two people in the lab at that point. I made sure to get pictures too, and just before leaving, I wrote a message on the whiteboard thanking everyone for all they had done for me.

This internship has honestly been one of the best experiences I have ever had. I've made some great friends and met some of the most exceptional people in the field of robotics. Professor Likhachev is an absolute genius who can think up planning algorithms on a whim, and Venkat's knowledge of complex machine learning systems kept me in awe in every presentation, even if I was more focused on appearing like I understood his lectures than actually understanding them. And Andrew the software engineer would answer any questions I had about C++ syntax, and though they were few and far between, I still enjoyed our late night Overwatch games. Although we didn't get to know each other that well, I still valued the great help that Karthik gave me. And finally my two greatest friends in Pittsburgh, Joe and Shivam, shared many wonderful moments with me, the tortellini dinner still standing as the best though. To talk about Pittsburgh, it was the best college city I could have imagined; small, but not too suburby, and there was always enough good food and interesting things to do. If it weren't for all the hills, I probably would have been able to accomplish that daily run I set out to do and never did. CMU was great too, with good food at the University Center, a beautiful campus, and a quality gym. Additionally, I feel like I've been able to grow not only as a programmer, but also as a person. Living by myself was one of the most rewarding things that I could have had, as I had the freedom to go eat when I wanted, manage a house, and also manage my own schedule. On the programming side, I now feel like I can manage a Linux system and write code in C++ and bash easily. I really feel confident in my abilities, unlike before when I was really confused. Ultimately, this was a great experience and made all the struggling of the past weeks really worth it. I can't be more grateful to the SBPL for teaching me everything and having the patience to take on a high school student for three years straight. Hopefully I'll get this opportunity somewhere else. And now for some more pictures: