Digital Humanities & Outreach

These past few weeks have been extremely busy for all of us! Getting together with the whole team last weekend was great. We got to know each other and practice working together--something which will be very valuable when we’re working together In Malta.

For my Digital Humanities work, I have been writing interview questions that we will ask specific Maltese people when we visit. We just got approval to re-use the questions from last year, which we will ask average people who live or work on sites where cisterns are located. The questions relate to Maltese culture, historical cistern usage, and the person’s knowledge about water shortage and climate change issues. I have also written another set of interview questions; one for water and/or cistern experts, and one for students and faculty members studying engineering. We’re hoping to get approval for these questions soon, as well!

For the US outreach component, we’ve been teaching some robotics lessons to second graders at the local elementary school. So far, we’ve completed teaching the first lesson to two different classes. I was in charge of this lesson, and Cecilia and Andrew worked with me to put it all together. Then, the rest of the Cal Poly team helped out in the classroom. I think that these lessons went really well! I was so surprised at how smart and willing to learn the students were. After working with the kids, we created Lesson 2, which we’ll start teaching next week. I’m really excited to continue with the outreach project both here and in Malta.

I’m hoping to progress more on the website once we choose a logo for the Water & Society project. We’ve narrowed down our selections, but making a choice has proven to be very difficult since so many people are giving input. Updates on that coming soon...

-Amanda

Harvey Mudd + Cal Poly meetup

Today was an exciting day! At noon, we (the Cal Poly team) met up with the Harvey Mudd students, Dr. Clark, and Dr. Gambin who traveled from Malta to meet with us this weekend. We all introduced ourselves to each other and had lunch at our favorite Greek cafe downtown. Following lunch, we carpooled over to a Cal Poly professor's house (Dr. Workman), who generously rented us her pool for the day to deploy into and test hardware.

The HMC students showed us their Robot Operating System (ROS) based data logging program, which will be extremely beneficial to the data collection process on-site. After that, we set up and deployed both ROVs into the pool to collect data. Both ROV systems are fully functional and we even have some exciting new sensors to log temperature and salinity information this year.

The team collected their first sonar data of the pool, which was very good for a first run. The sonar scans converged in our mapping algorithm and we have a decent map of the pool.

Pool map 

Sonar mosaic

The pool had particularly noisy data due to the curvature of the bottom of the pool coupled with the 30 degree sonar capture angle, so this was a very good first deployment.

Tomorrow we will be giving and listening to more presentations from the other projects and saying goodbye to our HMC counterparts. This weekend has made us eager to start our journey to Malta!

A weekend with the whole team!

Adding on to what Erik said...the Cal Poly and Harvey Mudd groups met up with Timmy Gambin (from University of Malta) for the first time this weekend. Here's some things we did today:

First, Jeff (an ICEX returner) showed the team how to put the ROV together. 

Then, we got the ROV in the water! The Harvey Mudd students used their PS3 controller to drive the ROV around the pool.

Cal Poly and Harvey Mudd students collaborate to stream temperature and pressure data from the ROV while it was in the water.

We troubleshooted some problems with the ROV, since this was our first time using it all together this year. We took apart the screen on the control box and found a loose cable in the monitor connection, so we reconnected the cable and then had a fully functional control box!

Each person in the group got to practice driving the ROV, taking sonar scans, and recording the direction of the ROV at each scan so that we could build a map later.

And here is the ICEX 2013 Team photo!

After spending the afternoon at the pool, we all went back to Cal Poly and Timmy Gambin taught us about Remote Sensing Technologies and the Management of Underwater Cultural

and Natural Heritage, which relates to the work he does in Malta.

Now, all of the students are still together and working hard :) The day went well, and we're meeting up again tomorrow morning for more!

Hey Everyone

My name is Jeff Forrester and I am a Senior studying Computer Science at Cal Poly. I look forward to working with all of you on this year's ICEX team. This is my third year participating in the ICEX program and I am excited to be fortunate enough to be chosen again. Hopefully I can bring my experiences from past trips to this years team and help make the trip run smoothly. This year I am working on 3D hole filling of our acquired data sets and hope to have some great results. I can't wait to meet all of the Harvey Mudd students soon!