Opening the Next Chapter

Time flies. Three years have passed since I began studying at the IT-university. Three pretty amazing years I might add! Having been interviewed twice about why I started at the Software Engineering and Management programme I’m still not sure I know or remember the answer. However, in retrospect I don’t really care either as it has been a perfect match and I’ve enjoyed (almost) every moment of it. And since this is my last blog post on this blog, allow me to explain why.

• Problem Based Learning (PBL) – Without a doubt the projects that we’ve carried out at the SEM programme has been the most rewarding, as well as the most demanding. Getting a group with members of extremely broad backgrounds to collaborate and produce quality results is as fun as it is challenging.
  

  Some dude (aka Jonte) enjoying the cleaning after a Christmas party

• Work space – I wrote about it last year and I got some harsh critique on the post in the lines of “How much did the ITU pay you to write that?” but I stand for every word I wrote. Having open areas, and areas in general, which students can go to everyday and basically use as an office has allowed, at least me, to pick up on questions, material and facts that I’m sure would have missed if I stayed at home.
• Flexibility – almost every course have allowed the students to, to some extent, choose their topic of specialisation themselves. Not only is it motivating, but it also allows me to early on discover which areas I’d like to follow up and perhaps specialise in.
• Diversity – roughly 60% of our class were foreigners. This provides a tremendous cultural experience. Enough said.
• Teachers – (and for my classmates reading, yes, I know it’s controversial) Actually we happen to have had the luxury of having Gothenburg University’s best teacher, Carl Magnus Olsson, as he was this spring awarded with the university’s finest pedagogical prize. However, without giving any names, we’ve also been unlucky to have some pretty crappy pedagogues and thereby also had the opportunity to practice our course evaluation skills.

Overall though, my ITU experience will be remembered for the amazing moments: hacking late nights with crazy and fun friends still somehow managing to deliver on-time, Emil Janitzek and my thesis writing, the crappy free coffee, the countless number of pranks a common result of either too much free coffee or too much intensive programming.

There’s tonnes more to say but it is time to move on. Many of my classmates are already busy earning money at various companies around Gothenburg, some are about to start any time, some are continuing to study. Myself, I’m continuing with an Erasmus Mundus Master’s degree in Distributed Computing starting as an exchange student in Portugal this autumn.

Two final remarks: One, if you have any questions feel free to contact me (marcus at quandoo dot se). Two, if you’re interested in blogging here contact me too and I’ll forward your request.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Cool on-going projects [part 2] – Going large

Working with a CCD camera and image recognition is one of the things you can do in if you choose to.

This time I want to highlight another student project carried out at the SEM program; the semester four Embedded Project. Linda, one of ITU’s PR responsible, wrote about last year’s project in Swedish on our institute’s (Applied IT) website and I have probably mentioned it before. But, this project is just so cool it deserves a mentioning on its own.

Muggy – the nextgen cleaning assistant
Each project is defined and organized by the students themselves and all students in the year two are involved. In practice this means that a few weeks before the project kicks-off a group of students voluntarily sits down, bangs their heads against the walls (banging is highly optional as it is not mentioned in the course plan), and comes up with an idea or concept for the class to realize. We did the so called ‘Mars Explorer‘. This year they’re making the world, or at least the IT-university, a better place by literally moving dirty mugs to the kitchen. The image recognizing, dockable, weight-sensitive beast built using multiple Arduino micro-controllers and some more will revolutionize the world. Right…

50 students, 1 product
Those of you with me so far realize that this project is doomed to fail. That is, of course, dependent on what you consider a failure. For me this project:

1. provides a massive educational experience, as it
2. is a complex social experiment with groups and individuals collaborating
3. gives each student a chance to improve in his/her specialization

Despite the best planners and skilled students some parts of the project is going to fail, or put it more gentle, there will always be room for great improvement. This is surely not the first project for SEM students, most of our education is problem and project based, but it is surely the first of its size. Integration and communication are two challenging areas of work. In the end most of it is down to social skills*.

What’s that cool?

Apparently the LED indicates that the scheduling is working...

Basically, it boils down to this: you have tons of fun working together with friends building a single tangible result. Even if your robot won’t drive straight or mistake bananas for mugs, your robot will kick-ass. Because you’ve made it. Together.

Friends have often asked if I ever got the chance to do the same project over again, would I do it? At first my answer was simply no (it is quite tiring to work that much), but when I think about it, didn’t I just have too so much fun? No project is ever the same, with a new scope and new set of resources, of course I would do it!

Learn more
If you want to follow this year’s students’ progress check out their project blog: http://itupw056.itu.chalmers.se/trac/emb10/blog

* I realize here that many will probably disagree, that technical skills is a prerequisite for producing something at all. That could be true, but a techie not able to communicate his excellence is no good techie to me. Feel free to disagree (and please comment if you do).

Cool on-going projects [part 1]

Believe it or not, this is useful data!

As usual at the SEM programme, a lot of the studying takes place in project courses, and possibly culminates in the bachelor thesis. In this, and a following post, I will highlight a few projects which in my opinion is really cool and fun.

Finger-tracking interaction device
Imagine using your fingers to steer, maneuver, or in some way interact (this is the keyword) with a device. This is what Ludvig and Gustav are working on in their thesis currently named “Pushing Towards Embodied Interactions.” On a practical note they are using low-tech image capturing devices (read: two off-the-shelf web cameras) and then, with real-time constraints, filtering the images to outline the contours (see image to the left). With this information isolated they can bind certain movements to events and thus you are able to control your computer.

What is the applicability of this you ask? Well, a lot of research is currently being done in human computer interaction, in which this project also can be categorized. One possible scenario is found in their introductory text: “As an example, the BMW research and technology group has implemented a head- and gesture system for controlling infotainment systems [in cars] and mention that in contrast to speech recognition, it can be used in noisy situations.”

Modeling complex software models in 3D
Jonatan and Joacim are working together with Ericsson AB on an implementation of a previous thesis conducted by one of this blog’s co-authors, Linda. In essence, they are testing if it is easier to understand a complex UML software model if it is visualised in three dimensions. By using the programming language python and the 3D library Panda they have successfully built a functional prototype. Watch the video below for an introduction.

Their research falls into a category called Model Driven Development which means that applications and systems are no longer developed in pure code, but rather with the use of sophisticated modeling tools in which you express a system’s behaviour through, for example, state charts.

Stay tuned for more projects!

Chilly nights at uni

When the sun sets, the frost comes creeping up the windows and darkness enters every corner of the land, most people go home and watch TV, eat sandwiches and think about tomorrow’s problems. But there are people that just never seem to go home. They sort of get stuck in what they are doing, and don’t even attempt to get out of it.

During nighttime, there are so many students left at uni.

I crossed the kitchen once and saw this lonesome girl, eating biscuits while being totally absorbed of the bright, blue light from her laptop screen. Everything else was so dark and I thought that she must be feeling utterly lonely, just sitting there by herself, while the rest of her friends had gone home (probably) hours ago.

There must be something in the air that makes students want to stay in the building for such a long time. The persistency to pass the upcoming exams? The project? Or just to use the wireless network for some time longer..?

It’s a fact that certain students almost never leave the building… any explanation?

Lost in Space & Time

I’ve spent the past few month in a blur where almost everything circulated around researching and producing a thesis, which was an extraordinary experience. However, that experience is not the purpose of today’s writing. It is about the feeling of waking up to a reality which is long forgotten, with plenty of loose ends to take care of as well as an unknown future.

I have now handed in my very last paper to the SE&M program and my three years has passed by so fast. I wonder how that could be? Could it be because I’ve had that much fun? It is said that time passes by quicker if you have fun but it haven’t been only joy and laughter, its been plenty of hard work and frustration besides the fun. Now that I am waking up from my thesis blur, I think that it is rather due to the level of focus. I was so concentrated on the tasks at hand that I didn’t reflect upon how much time had passed by. It has been three intense years, not only have I had many courses but also one project each term, where we worked in groups to achieve something new (at least to me) each project.

For example the first term project we developed an application in Java, which was to be used by dentists to share information with each other. Another example is the fourth term, where we worked as a whole class with Lego NXT in an embedded project to create different support systems for a car. I was in the group of adaptive cruise control who, amongst other things, made the robot slow down to follow cars in front of it automatically.

Each project has been very interesting and brought new challenges. This often lead me to a point where I got surprised if the doors to the university weren’t already locked for the evening when I headed home. Putting that much effort into the projects made me always feel a bit lost in both space and time when the projects came to an end.

How do you feel when a project that was important to you have ended? And how do you handle it?