Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 7

Sept. 30.: Spent the last few days deciding what I'm going to do course-wise and research-wise this term. One interesting consequence of the egalitarian climate is no one hands you a list of courses you have to take and things you have to do before you graduate. You have to be independent and make your own plan. I've lined up two lab positions for myself, one with my advisor and one with a professor who I met at the boot camp. I'm sitting in on two seminars outside of my department, but considering dropping one of them because the professor is too 'linear' for me (thanks to Steve Pearce for introducing me to the term). I've never thought it was useful to suppose there there is only one right answer when doing science, and this class seems to be going that way. It's a great class for someone who wants to learn rigorous methods for solving a very specific subset of questions in linguistics, but that's not me – I like to be more creative (i.e. nonlinear) in my approach to cognitive science. To each his own, I guess.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 6

Sept. 24-25: The Cognitive Science Department held its orientation for new (and old) graduate students. One thing that really impresses me here is the academic climate. It is very egalitarian. Professors treat graduate students like peers as opposed to underlings. The faculty want us to explore their interests and pursue the things we want to pursue. It's quite unlike graduate schools at small state universities, where you are basically admitted by a particular professor and then you become their indentured servant, doing the kind of research they want you to do. Here, it's the opposite: they accept a group of bright, talented people and let us do what interests us. I'm lucky that I already have an advisor whose research interests match my own, so there's a lot I can learn from her already.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 5

Sept. 18: I miss that drink cooler from boot camp! Must be caffeine withdrawal.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 4

Sept. 17.: Woke up on this Monday morning and realized I have nothing to do all week... The fall quarter doesn't start until late September. So far, it has been like being on vacation (except for all the working... but if you enjoy what you do, it doesn't seem like work). The boot camp was catered, and there was enough food and drink to keep us all plump n' giggly for 2 weeks, but now it's time to unpack the cookware and become self-sufficient again. Have I mentioned my apartment is completely bare? It's because the graduate students' salaries for teaching and research don't start until October when the fall term officially starts, and I've been avoiding furnishing this place until then.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 4

Sept. 17.: Woke up on this Monday morning and realized I have nothing to do all week... The fall quarter doesn't start until late September. So far, it has been like being on vacation (except for all the working... but if you enjoy what you do, it doesn't seem like work). The boot camp was catered, and there was enough food and drink to keep us all plump n' giggly for 2 weeks, but now it's time to unpack the cookware and become self-sufficient again. Have I mentioned my apartment is completely bare? It's because the graduate students' salaries for teaching and research don't start until October when the fall term officially starts, and I've been avoiding furnishing this place until then.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 3

Sept. 15: All the Boot Camp participants presented their week-long projects today, and there was some nifty work. My group didn't quite master the multi-voxel pattern analysis method, but then again, Rome wasn't built in a day. Me, my groupmates, and one of the senior graduate students in the CogSci department are going to continue to look at it. I did master the fMRI data analysis software though, and produced some nifty reconstructions of my brain on the computer. Here is a representative picture of my own brain activity during a basic visual recognition task.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 2

Sept. 8: Got my brain scanned at the fMRI center today. Everything is still there. Next week we process the data. Going to spend this weekend at the beach riding out the rest of this San Diego heat wave.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 1

Sept 7: My first week of graduate school at UCSD has been intense, and the fall term hasn't even started yet. I am participating in a program called Boot Camp – two weeks of intensive research mentorship and training funded by the National Science Foundation. The topic of the boot camp is Computer Vision and Learning. I am focusing on the human-learning part, and gaining valuable experience at computer modeling and neuroscience methods along the way. For our group project we are going to apply a machine learning algorithm to data from functional MRI brain scans. It's a technique called multi-voxel pattern analysis, which basically applies a linear classifier to data from brain images to see if we can predict (actually 'postdict') what the brain was doing at some point in time. The basic idea is to look for distributed networks (as opposed to loci) of brain activity that work together during basic memory/attention/perception processes.

Doug Yovanovich: UCSD Post 0

Doug Yovanovich is a graduate of the Cognitive Science Program at Simon Fraser University. He recently started working towards his PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. This is his report of the first few weeks at UCSD, including the "Boot Camp" he attended.


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