PBL - 02

I started working on the problem just 3 hours before the 2nd meeting. As i did some literature review in BCI for Dr Sada during my college days, i thought i can manage to pull something for the meeting. But i could not remember most of the stuff, so i had to go back to the basics - search in Google. After an hour of futile search, i went into the university web pages and tried to get some info from there - EPFL, Tubingen, i2r, .... I compiled all the relevant stuff into a 2 page word document, hoping that would be sufficient for today's meeting. I also found out that the June 2004 issue of IEEE transactions in Biomedical Engineering was focused on BCIs. I rushed to the central library to borrow the book, and get some ideas. But unfortunately, the issue was placed in closed stacks section, and as a result i could not retrieve it immediately.

All said and done, i set ahead for the meeting. I was not satisfied with my preparation for the meeting. I lacked an agenda of how the meeting would go about. I thought may be everyone would present their findings, the group would critic each other's work, and action would be taken accordingly. When all 6 of us met (Linbo decided to join gp 4 as they were in short of members and Yixiang could not attend due to some pressing engagement), after the usual hi's and hello's, i asked everyone if they were ready to share their findings with others and state the problems they found out in their respective fields. Zhan Liang started, focused on the signal processing aspect, and mentioned couple of issues in that area. I asked a few questions to clear my understanding. I was dominating most of the proceedings so far. Lei Yang seemed to dislike the way the meeting was heading. So she suggested a 4 step model to work on the problem. Ludovic suggested another approach. Olivier, Ni Jun and Zhan Liang did not express their concerns. So, I came up with a hybrid of the two models and we resumed. Olivier did a lot of research, brought a ppt with him on his findings, shared with us about the diff. research groups in the BCI area. He also showed us some videos. I shared what Singapore is doing on BCI, showed them the i2r BCI homepage. Ludovic commented that his lab mate works in the i2r BCI project. So, we decided to make an appointment with the relevant ppl in i2r as soon as possible. We decided that the BCI group should focus on the different research groups and find the relevant materials. Ni Jun gave a brief overview about NP and discussed a few problems in this area. Ni Jun was to the point, concise and presented all the relevant stuff without extra annotations. I liked his way of presenting. Ludovic took over from Ni Jun, talked about the different NP devices - ear, eye, brain,...Like Olivier, he also made a ppt of his findings. I learnt a lot of new stuff about NP today. The group decided that the 3 members in NP should work on respective devices.

Agenda for the next meeting is - everyone gives a 15 minute presentation about his/her findings. We meet on 6th September after the class. I volunteered to book the relevant room. I also volunteered to send the minutes of the meeting for everyone's benefit. As Ludovic and Olivier were going to Shangai this week for conference, they said that they would try to bring relevant stuff about BCI and NP from the conference.

Personally, lessons i learnt today were
(a) Be prepared for the meeting
(b) Have an agenda in hand
(c) Do not dominate over the proceedings. Ask for others' opinions
(d) Always be alert, never know when you might have to come up with hybrid solutions to tackle the problem.
(e) Maximize the effectiveness from the group. Never settle for less when we can achieve for more (like today we decided to meet the the i2r guys, invite them to share their expertise to our group or to the whole class. We could have just dropped the idea altogether if we were lazy to work).

PBL - 01

Before the 1st meeting with my group on 22nd August, on 21st august i invited Lei Yang, Yixiang, Robin and Zhang Xin to join the group. I wanted to work in a diverse group this semester. As the two Swiss guys were already part of group 1, i joined that group hoping it would be a new learning experience for me to work with Europeans. I wanted a mix of engineers and non-engineers in my group. But group 1 ended up having 7 engineers and 1 biologist (who is passionate about engineering).

The 1st meeting was quite interesting. I asked my fellow group members during the class if it is ok for them to stay back after the lecture so that we can have a get to know each other session. As ususal, i took the initiative to introduce the group members to each other. During their self introductions, I came to know that Lei Yang has some experience in BCI, Yixiang knew what an NP is, and Olivier and Ludovic were also aware of some MMIs. After some non-trivial discussion on MMIs, we decided to divide the group of 8 into 4 each for BCI and NP. The Swiss duo wanted to stay in the same sub-group but later decided to join BCI and NP respectively. Ni Jun and Zhan Liang were almost silent thru' the whole meeting. Next meeting is on 29th August at 1600hrs outside LT7A.