Week Six – Problems in Paradise

This week’s main goal was to collect 100,000 audio samples with Bruce (our makeshift echo locator bat) and work on the neural network in hopes of getting some decisive results. Sadly, but humorously, we managed to run into every single possible problem before we even got to training and testing the neural net. One of …

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Week 6- A breakthrough!

  As I had desperately hoped, the temporary setbacks that constituted last week's major obstacles shed some light on how to move forward with the project after all. After understanding that those problems were largely the result of the way TensorFlow alters tensors by returning new ones, I set about combing through the code to …

[Week Seven] How to Train Your Bat

Diana joins me this week to take on the task of training Bruce, our moody artificial echolocator. One of our biggest goals was to create a large dataset— 100,000 audio-depth samples from various rooms in the ISAT/CS building. Below are the problems we dealt with and the solutions we worked at: The current configuration of …

Circle Packings – Week 7

At the end of last week, I finished creating the Python script that generates 180 different 1D grayscale banded images, simulating the scan of a soap bubble cluster at every angle from 0 to 180 degrees. As a memory-refresher: Fig. 1: 1D Image representing a scan from a given angle This week, I worked on …

(Week 7) Now We’re Getting Somewhere… Literally!

There's not a whole lot to say on the social side of things, other than that I participated in a bake-off last night (great dessert - cinnamon apple crumble - but it didn't win). Oh, and that I went exploring the campus and watched the sunset with some of the other REU students - hearing …

Week Five – Spectrograms and Practice CNN

This week I worked on a program that aligns audio data so that the sounds have the same starting time. This improves accuracy in the Spectrograms plotted from the data. I used audio data collected by Nhung for an earlier practice to test the program, but this afternoon we’re going to integrate it into the …

Week 5 – one step forward, two steps back, one step… forward?

Prior to the experiences with which I have been presented this summer, I would likely have greeted initial failure at some particular task as an indicator of incompetence. However, it is with a renewed desire to perform genuinely progressive research that I can honestly say that not only does such initial failure come with the …

(Week 6) Uncertain Certainties? Certainly.

This week was a blizzard of bug fixing and board games. Us CS folks really got into the latter this week, especially a popular one called "Catan." Basically, there's this island on which we place settlements, roads, and cities using resources that we've mined from specific tiles, which, in a cool kind of twist, are …

Circle Packings – Week 6

Last week, I worked on integrating code from the circle packing software, CirclePack, into our library, generating random convex hulls of circles on the sphere, and projecting points, lines, circles, and arcs from the sphere onto a 2D plane. This week was all about taking these advances from last week and finally starting to incorporate …

[Week Six] Digitalized Audio vs Spectrograms

Team Sprague visited Dr. Rolf Mueller's lab at Virginia Tech last Friday to learn more about bats and collect data! To the left is a picture of the wall of plastic leaves that resides in the Mueller lab as a part of their research on how bats deal with foliage as they hunt. We used …