Skip to main content

Rohit, My First Week at the Berkeley Deep Drive Lab

My first day at my lab was generally straightforward, except for the location. Initially I expected my lab to be on Berkeley's campus a short ten minute walk away from my apartment that I will be sharing with Alan for the rest of my time at Berkeley. Just to make sure I was going to the right location I e-mailed my PI, Dr. Chan, to confirm what time and where he wanted to meet with me. Fortunately my PI responds to his emails quickly and informed me that I would actually need to go to the Richmond field station, which was 6 miles north and a twenty minute shuttle ride away. The Richmond field station was previously a naval base but has been an extension of the Berkeley campus since the 1950's. The field station is used by many of the Berkeley researchers that require additional space for testing as space in generally is limited on campus.


In terms of autonomous driving there are many different groups of researchers each working on different projects, Dr. Chan's team works with two Lincoln MKZ vehicles to collect raw real world data that could be used for further analysis and development of autonomous control algorithms. There is also another group of researchers that work directly with Hyundai and are working on developing a fully autonomous Hyundai vehicles, lastly there is another groups of researchers that are working on creating autonomous semi-trucks in a partnership with the Canadian DOT (department of transportation), US DOT and Volvo. 

Dr. Chan introduced me to the rest of his team which included a local high school student, two graduate students one from South Carolina and the other from France, three doctorate students, two from China and one also from France. I worked with Mr. Long Xin who was a doctorate student from China, he explained to me the current projects the lab was working on and recommend that I learn how to code in python so I could understand and help out with certain tasks. As a result I ended up spending my first week and a half working on learning how to code in python through an online tutorial. Although this made me feel as though I was completing a tedious task I understood that it was necessary for me to later help contribute to the lab's research. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

As mentioned in my previous blog, I have been awaiting ligament, menisci, and cartilage tissue from a canine or human knee joint for (interleukin) IL-1B tissue culture. IL-1B is an inflammatory cytokine that has been proven to increase rates of tissue degeneration and osteoarthritis development in the Thompson Lab. Dr. Stoker wants me to experiment with different types of knee tissues in a co-culture with varying levels of this cytokine to determine its effects on the entire knee joint. This co-culture uses an insert permeable to the media to separate the two tissue samples from physical contact, while allowing them to share the same media. This creates an extremely accurate model for knee tissues in their native environment due to their exposure to the same synovial fluid in the joint. This model would then be treated with the IL-1B and cultured for 21 days. During these 21 days, the media would be collected every three days for biomarker evaluation at the end of the stu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...
3 comments
Read more