Daily Log 2

Well, my ambition of writing daily posts has thus far failed miserably. Never before has by life held up to the mantra of "Work Hard, Play Hard," but I'm enjoying every minute of this organized chaos. I have been waking up early and getting back late without a boring moment between.

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Monday (5/31)

Sara, Liz, and I woke bright and early to register with the International Relations Office. We went through the bureaucracy and forms and came out of it all with Korean bank accounts and key cards to get us into all of the academic buildings on campus. It took time to trek back and forth across campus, but we met a group of other summer students from the boys' dorm which was also jumping through hoops and the time passed quickly from there. It was interesting to learn that most international students in the KAIST International Summer School (KISS) program are from Singapore through exchange programs at their home universities.

At noon, we made our way back to the lab, and back to work. I continued my research on simulated facial expressions in robots until Korean class at 2. We impressed the professor with our limited knowledge of Korean (the 'hello,' 'nice to meet you,' 'my name is _____,' and alphabet literacy from our two-day crash course at Drexel taught by a Korean grad student in DASL), and most likely intimidated the other students. The professor seems incredibly sweet and animated, which I think will make class warm and fun. I was so nerdily excited to get my Korean language work and resource books!

At 3, we moved to the next building over for orientation. We were given snacks and powerpoint presentations as well as personal invitations to groups on campus, such as the KI house which does one-on-one Korean tutoring sessions for free. It was comforting to meet the coordinators of the program as well as student mentors who could help us out in a bind or just hang out with us if we liked.

Dinner was delicious as usual, but we didn't linger in the cafeteria for too long. We went back to the lab in time for the weekly meeting where each student presents his or her progress. The presentations were first in Korean with detailed explanations and feedback from the peers, but then the students did short presentations in English to introduce us to their topics. Dr. Jun Ho Oh also asked each of us to introduce ourselves and our research topics to the group, then matched us up with his students so that we could collaborate and learn with more experienced engineers.

After presentations, at about 10pm, we got in touch with a KAIST student friend of a friend from school and decided to meet right then. As soon as we had introduced ourselves to Bill, and he to us, he proposed to take us out for drinks. We walked off campus to a traditional bar, where we had makkoli (an approximated romanization of the word), a rice wine, and pig's feet salad as well as side-dish servings of ice cream, corn cream salad, cornflake rings, black noodles, and yogurt and fruit salad. We all got better at speaking the other's language as the night went on, and I felt so at home with the company. We came home extremely late, but ecstatically exhausted.

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Tuesday (6/1)

Breakfast then registering for an overnight field trip to Gyeongju (a historical city) then lab at 10:30 to meet with Dr. Jun Ho Oh. He consulted with us, gave us our new headquarters (a gorgeous room with a desk big enough for three and a whole wall of windows), and advised us a little on how to begin our projects.

I met with my coworking graduate student, Cheol Son, to learn about his work in personality programming in more depth so that I could work most efficiently and effectively to find useful research for him.  I had just enough time to start on research before it was time to meet for lunch with Bill. The four of us went off-campus to his friend's restaurant, the Pasta House, and had some impromptu Korean lessons.

(This picture is us on the Endless Road- the straight stretch of road that constitutes an entire fifth of the campus perimeter. It was fondly nicknamed the Endless Road because, when you have had too much to drink, you can run and run and run along it and never get to the end.)

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Wednesday (6/2) (National Voting Day in Korea- Holiday)

Rest and recuperation!

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Thursday (6/3)

We woke up ready to work with a vengeance.  Early breakfast and diving into research.  I spent all day in the lab collecting a thorough literature review of robotic bodily expression of emotion, or robotic body language.  The goal is to create vitality and personality in this robot:

In later models, Cheol aims to add facial expressions and gestures, but this robot allows for a lot of body language with its 7 degrees of freedom (DOF)- meaning that it has 7 ways to move at its joints.

For dinner, Sara, Liz, and I met up with Bill and his best friend Yumi.  Dinner in the undergraduate cafeteria was still delicious to me, but those who have been here longer maintain that it's boring and terrible compared to food outside of campus.  I don't think I'll get sick of it in six weeks, but we'll see!  After dinner, we played pool for a while.  I lost every game, but had a fantastic time playing around with them.

It was a late night in the lab, but my bed was all the more comfortable for it.