Author: Nathan Kassai, Email: kassan2@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 06/23/2024

This week, I did not attend my internship as Baekseok and I had to travel to New York City to give a presentation at the Ubiquitous conference! Below is a summary of what I had done each day.

Landed safely in NYC! Since we had a red-eye flight, we mainly slept for the day. For housing, New York University actually offered the dorms for us! Once Baekseok and I arrived to the dorms, we took a long nap. In the evening, we met up with Dongbin and walked around, grabbed some of the best Thai food I've ever had, and headed to sleep.

Today was the first day of the conference! Since today consisted of workshops, I did not attend (the price was expensive for workshops!). However, Baekseok had left to volunteer. That left most of Monday to travel around NYC! Since this was my first time every in NYC, I wanted to travel around as much as I could! Looked around Battery Park, took the Staten Island Ferry, saw Times Square, grabbed some great pizza, etc. I think I traveled around Manhattan and Staten Island for a grand total of almost 8 hours!

After a long nap, I spent some time practicing for my presentation on Wednesday, grabbed dinner, and headed to bed.

Officially day one of the conference! Baekseok had left a little earlier than I did for volunteering, but I met up with Nick at the dorms and we headed to the conference. In front of the main hall was a small teleoperation demo with a Kinova arm. Nick and I got a chance to try it out, and spoke with one of the engineers.

Got to see a lot of great talks for the first official day. Some of my favorites involved using a Hololens to control a fleet of mobile robots, while also visualizing the location of each robot via GPS relative to the operator. Another cool talk involved reducing cognitive load on operators by using XSens wearable IMU's to remotely control the pose of their mobile robot.

Got to see Donbgin and Baekseok's talk! They both did a great job! Puts a little pressure on me to do well too, ahh! Got a chance to walk around with Dongbin and Nick after grabbing some ice cream, and got a chance to catch up. Headed back to the dorms after an eventful day and got some rest.

Today's the day! My first ever in person oral presentation. So eager, I woke up at around 3:30 am and couldn't sleep , so I spent most of the morning practicing my presentation. I'm feeling confident and ready to give this talk! Grabbed some coffee & breakfast on my way to the conference, and I caught up with Nick and Dongbin for a little bit prior to the first Plenary speaker. The first plenary speaker, Dr. Mombaur, had a really interesting talk! Her work with Humanoids and using data from operators in Motion Capture to learn how certain human motions can be mapped to their humanoid platform was awesome!

I gave my talk at 11:20 (last for our session) and it seemed that people liked it! I got great questions from the audience as well as a lot of people taking photos of my slides. Felt confident all throughout, and I felt pretty good about it afterwards.

Today was our scheduled last day in New York City, but I guess the city didn't want us to leave. Our flight got canceled due to terrible weather. Thankfully Dongbin let us sleep at his apartment, and we spent another great day in New York!