Tsang's RISE Trip

New people and new things

Well I have been working here in Dortmund just over 3 weeks now, it amazes me how fast things are flying by. New people have been arriving and I've been getting new things to do at work here. Sasan and Lauren arrived in Dortmund last week and yesterday another American, Reed showed up and he lives next door to me.

Our group has turned into a nice mix of introverts and extraverts which makes good company. When there were only a few of us, we all shared the same stories of loneliness and boredom as we spent the first couple days disconnected from the community and many miles away from our homes. As we began to hang out, it became our goal to stay out of our respective residences for as long as we could to prolong the contact and communication between people. Now, we proactively greet and welcome the new arrivals showing them around and helping them settle in. It is interesting to see the insecurity of being a stranger in a new country from another perspective, but I'm sure in a couple of days, as they adjust to their new surroundings, they will be okay on their own.

Work has given me a new perspective on MATLAB which I thought I was quite comfortable with. (if you have no interest in CHEE, skip this section) Turns out there are many other functions and shortcuts to learn in addition to significant increases in complexity. I have spent the last couple days, pouring through code going through nested loops and nested functions which are part of process control, trying to understand what is going on (especially difficult since the comments are in German). I am also gaining an understanding of new control techniques that may have been sidenoted in class, but are the thesis and main focus of study of our group with things such as Model Predictive Control and Branch and Bound algorithms as well as Genetic Algorithms. I still feel that everybody in the lab is a genius with programming, but I suspect many of the students here have backgrounds in systems design and programming. Fortunately I only need to gain an understanding of what is going on, as opposed to being able to recreate the procedures. Right now, I am considering using what I have learned in CHEE 418 to design an experiment with a limited number of runs (each run takes a long time) to determine the parameter that affects the system the most and also to try and establish a relationship between speed of the program vs. parameter value. Well that should be enough to satisfy any CHEE's reading this.

My office is a steam room which I share with Abdul from Syria and Neha from India. Abdul is working on his master's thesis and has been showing me the in's and out's of the university (like where to find the best travel ideas) in addition to some excellent Arab music. Neha is on internship from India on a program much like mine. The floor below has excellent circulation. Unfortunately, hot air rises and refuses to leave our space. The vents cannot be opened since our office is in a laboratory so the three of us are suffering silently in our office. We cope by taking quick breaks downstairs to get some fresh air.

From an engineering standpoint, there are lots of interesting structures and statues spread around the university grounds. This things below is one of them, I may start randomly throwing in more photos of these things that I see on campus grounds. There is also a sweet school transport system that connects one campus to the other (think of a monorail between west and main). It is a monorail which looks like a roller coaster that travels to and from student residences as well as south campus and north campus. Every school should have one.

The university here is quite active with concerts and student parties. Yesterday I attended a production of the student orchestra here where they played a tune by Rachmoninov, another song that was led by a Marimba (think giant xylophone) followed by Finlandia and headlined by Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (the main draw for me). It was excellent. Tonight there is a large campus residence party which I may or may not attend. It's been a tiring couple of days and tommorow is the big German-Argentina game which promises a significantly larger party.

On the World Cup side, things are still pretty big, there was a round of 16 match played here (Ghana and Brazil) and there will be another semi-final game being played in Dortmund and it could very well be Brazil again. The crowds are great and have been nothing like the crowd during the Poland-German game where the 5-0 made some 126 arrests and showed up in full riot gear with large police buses as temp prisons.

Also in the city this past couple days, there has been this Cirque de Soleilish thing in the theme of world cup, hence the giant soccer ball and spandex clad acrobats.

Well that's it for now, until next time...

posted by ktsang @ 2:02 PM