Photo Journal 6

This is a picture of my screen when I sit down to write a blog post, and it is significant to me because I have spent a significant amount of time looking at it.  As any reader could surmise, I have had my difficulties in keeping up with my ambitious mission for this blog (the thoroughly thorough documentation of my time in Korea).  My program director tells me that almost none of the students that he has sent to Korea has kept up with the weekly blog; firstly, this means that I am in good company, and secondly that there is most likely something about blogging itself that leads to shirking and procrastination.  I have spent a lot of time musing about the act of blogging when I couldn't bring myself to actually write.

Blogging is a strange creature.  It exists along a fine line between private journal and public account.  In any writing, there are the constraints of time and space and language, and so you must necessarily choose only a few topics from the infinite supply of life experience.  In blogging, as in private journaling, you choose subjects that are significant to you in order to be genuine, but blogging differs in that you have to choose and address topics with a wide audience in mind, not just the self.  Thus the blog is not entirely candid, not entirely censored, but rather the best of the self, that which you want to share.

Of course, without feedback from readers, especially academic feedback, it is easy to lose the audience and write for and to oneself- that is, to fall too far to one side of the line.  On the other hand, getting too caught up in the anonymous general audience that is the internet puts you too far on the other side of the line, inciting anxiety and creating confusion about which voice to use or which subjects to address.  In my mind, this tenuous balance of walking the line creates a unique self-consciousness when writing a blog.

Essentially, a blog is a publication that represents you both in substance and in style.  It is writing that is both by you and about you.  At least for me, this means that I want to be in the right mindset and in the best state to produce my best work, and it is extremely challenging to find this mood with enough time and resources to sit down and blog in the midst of the busy, disorienting, and exciting setting of life on KAIST's campus.

Without practice, comfort with the medium of blogging, and dedication, it is easy for the assigned weekly post to give way to procrastination or anxiety.

Photo Journal 5

This photo is actually from our third week at Hubo Lab, but it has been a while since I took pictures in a weekly meeting.  I want to write about this picture now because I made huge progress on my research this week, and it has made me think about my academic life here.

I was thrilled when Dr. Jun Ho Oh introduced me to Cheol Son as a mentor/partner in the lab as someone who could both use my area of expertise (psychology) and help me to apply it to robotics.  It turned out to be perfect that he had just begun a project aimed at creating personality in robots by programming them to react with specific emotions in different situations (for example, a crowd of ten people versus only two).  He explained that he needs more research to support the more subjectively known characteristics of body movement specific to each emotion that he wants to express in the robot.  My research paper, therefore, is most like a body language key; I combined and distilled a lot of prior research on the subject until I had the most quantitative, specific, and supported description of each emotional expression written up in a table.

When I had completed that request with Cheol, he created a simulation program through MATLAB and let me simulate the emotions myself.  It was rewarding and challenging work, and I really value what I feel is a collaborative relationship of mutual respect with Cheol.  In fact, I feel like all of the students in the lab and especially Dr. Jun Ho Oh were welcoming and willing to help whenever I needed materials or an answer to a question.  Sara, Liz, Peter, and I were given a separate room (formerly a storage room) with a large desk and its own AC unit to work in, but we were given access to all other working areas of the lab and to the weekly meetings where students present their work progress.

Of course I felt like an outsider, being a Western undergraduate woman in a lab of all academically elite Korean males, but I was treated as a valued member of the lab.  The real barrier between myself and the students of the Lab was language.  Although they spoke a good amount of English, which, luckily for me, is the current language of academia in Korea, it was sometimes very difficult to ask questions of Cheol without creating misunderstandings.  Weekly meetings were also alienating because the members of Lab presented in Korean; however, the slides were in English, which allowed us to follow at least the subject and objective of each presentation, and, if my topic of research is worth anything, also gave us context for the body language and tone of voice cues that we could still read.