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Charles Chung - Week 0-1


5 weeks of EXP? That's almost a sin.

Earlier in July, the grad student I’m working with, David, emailed me about his 2-week field trip to Costa Rica to collect data on a special type of bat with suction cup sticky disks (Thyroptera tricolor). This affected the first week of my original 6-week experience and had me reduced to 5-weeks, but he came up with another project that I would be working on.

I remember earlier in sophomore year when Dr. Peretz gave her initial EXP presentation and told us not to pack our schedules for the summer if we planned to do EXP. But that’s exactly what I did. I played a lot of golf over the first half of the summer. A college commitment was my goal but that didn’t go as planned. I did bring home two trophies though.

So I had my 6 weeks cut down to 5, but my summer was already planned out and the Airbnb booked. For week 0, I stayed in the Airbnb in Federal Hill, Providence to work on my common app and began my summer homework. I also read the two primary literature articles and some other digitizing work David sent me. Digitizing, or motion tracking/video analysis, was done on a software called XMALab, which was developed at Brown. I was given files with three perspectives of a bat in flight, broken down into a JPG stack, and had to track each frame on five points on the body: left shoulder, right shoulder, lumbar, left wrist and right wrist. I tracked 5 points on the body for around 200 frames. Some quick math gives 1000 left clicks and right arrows each on the keyboard.

July 30 was my first day at the lab. David and I began setting goals for the week and goals for the whole 5-week journey. I received a quick math lesson in vectors in 3D as well as an explanation in pitch, roll, yaw angles and graphs. For the first three days, I worked on digitizing the data that was collected. This was a necessary part of the research process, as videos had to be turned into xyz data points before they could be graphed and analyzed. By the end of the week, I had gotten nine trials of tracking done.

On Wednesday, we had a lab meeting where David presented his slideshow of photos from Costa Rica. He briefly discussed his journey, the set-up and some videos. I also met with Professor Swartz the day after and we talked about the different bat muscles and anatomy that contributed to how bats fly and land. We also looked into high-res images of the sensory hairs on bat wings.

Here is a video of Thyroptera flying into a furled leaf for roosting:


The rest of the week, I relearned MATLAB coding and wrote some code to grab data from my data (from the digitizing) and turn them into graphs. I analyzed the rotations using normal left-right-up-down words and figured out that it didn’t make sense. The problem was that the order in which pitch, roll and yaw were calculated had an impact on the graph’s output. David tried to fix the graphs as best as possible but the results flipped in some of the frames. However, these “fixed” graphs made it so that the data could be easier to interpret.

Here was the graph before the revamp:

Here are two versions of the graphs after the order was changed:


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