Possibly presenting research

UIUC holds an Undergraduate Research Symposium every spring. My lab supervisor suggested that I present my bioinformatic work, so with his help I wrote an abstract and applied to present a poster. The symposium isn't until April, so I have plenty of time to put the poster together.

Course development up and running

This semester, I'm continuing on the course staff of an introductory CS class. My role is now officially the maintenance/development of auto-graded programming assignments. The first such assignment, written by the professor using a new testing approach I demonstrated, was released to students yesterday. There have been a couple snags, but they seem to be resolved now. The remaining assignments will be reruns from previous semesters with some polishing that I'll handle.

Not so light

I thought this week would be pretty light because of MLKJ day, but lab work has made up for that. I was in the lab yesterday between meetings and today after class. Over the last few days, we did a Western blot on cells containing the plasmids I prepared last semester. Although not perfect, the resulting images are the best I've gotten so far.

Added a class

My schedule is pretty light in credit hours this semester, so I decided to add the CS 233 honors section, which covers various extra topics and has a few extra labs. Notably, the final project involves Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. The first homework assignments covered error detection codes and CMOS logic. Very neat so far!

Light week

Today being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, there were no classes. Since there were no classes today, courses that hold some discussion/lab sections on Mondays cancelled them for the entire week. I therefore have no classes tomorrow or Thursday. That leaves plenty of time for lab work, which I did this afternoon and will continue tomorrow.

App use increasing

Last semester I released an Android app for the campustown bus system. For much of last semester, it hovered around 200 users. I noticed earlier this week, though, that it recently jumped to more than 230. I haven't been advertising it, but I did look a bit into Facebook ads and might deploy a few of those eventually.

Course staffing resumes

Tonight was the first meeting of the CS 125 course staff, which I joined last semester and will continue on this semester. It was mostly training for course assistants (people holding office hours and managing labs) but also had an overview of the assessments that will be given. The two-week assignment I helped write will be run again. A couple major assignments will be brushed up a bit and run again - hopefully I'll get to help maintain them.

Back up to speed

Classes started up again yesterday. I only had three then, but it was a moderately intense day anyway. CS 233 offered a visual/spatial skills test for extra credit, but the only times it was available were during class or my lunch break, so I took it instead of eating. The classes were mostly introductions instead of material, which is good because the ice makes it dangerous to get from one class far up north back down to another back on the main quad in 10 minutes. Fortunately I was only a minute late. After classes, I went to the lab to briefly discuss plans for the semester.

Another semester begins

I returned to campus this afternoon. I unpacked all my clothes and, after a while getting my dorm computer back up to date, went to the bookstore to pick up my textbooks. Then I went through the course startup checklist sent out for CS 233. That class has a collection of pre-lecture videos and a quiz for each lecture. I did the one for tomorrow (a brief introduction to logic gates and Verilog) and found it very interesting - the course should be a good time, though perhaps a lot of work.

Despite the semester starting tomorrow, I've heard nothing about my application to join the CS 225 course staff. I did some searching: apparently staff won't be finalized until the end of the first week.