Professor Seth Teller

Posted on by cathywu

seth teller - shrinkrob

Professor Seth Teller, my former advisor (as an undergrad researcher), mentor, and academic role model, passed away earlier this month. He truly and passionately worked towards addressing important problems (with autonomous vehicles, assistive technologies, and robotics for disaster recovery at least!), somehow with both vigor and patience; he has done so much, and yet there was so much more to do and more to come. The situation is entirely shocking to me, and I wanted to share some words.

On 7/12, I was reminded of how compassionate of a community MIT is. I woke up to an email with the subject line “Call me ASAP” from my former grad student supervisor David Hayden. It had been more than 1.5 years since we were last in touch, but he wanted me to hear the sad news from a person and not from something less personal (i.e. email, internet). (Thank you, David, I really appreciated it!) And it’s a great reflection of the warm person that Seth was (and the people around him!). No matter how busy he was, he would smile and greet me in the halls, and always made time to meet with me when I asked. Throughout the day, friends messaged me, and I messaged friends, to make sure that everyone was doing alright. A couple years out of MIT now, I am reminded that Seth has touched so many people, so many lives. Even friends who did not know him except as a professor reached out to say a few kind words.

I want to share one small anecdote, which has affected me to today.

About 2.5 years ago, having very little clue about what I wanted to do/achieve with my life (what some of us fondly call the quarter-life crisis), I went to Seth Teller at a loss and told him the executive summary of my vague interests: “I think self-driving cars are pretty cool.” Seth had co-led the MIT DARPA Urban Driving Challenge team back in 2006, but at this point, it was mostly a past project. He told me the following: “If you have an idea of what your passion in life is, then you have to go after it as hard as you possibly can. Only then can you hope to find your true passion.”

Anyone can tell you to go after your dreams. Seth’s insight is that dreams and ambitions are not always clear from the start — they may be hidden, they may manifest themselves in several forms. He knew that hard work is required to find them, extract them from the mess of school and experience and daily life, pursue them, and achieve them.

Shortly after, I left his group and joined the Distributed Robotics Lab (under Daniela Rus, MIT), where I started studying transportation problems from a computational/robotics perspective and did my Masters thesis on algorithms for automatic mapping (“GPSZip: semantic representation and compression system for GPS using coresets”). And now I have moved on to Alex Bayen’s group at Berkeley to continue studying the problems of estimation, prediction, and control/automation of current and future transportation systems.

In short: When I grow up, I want to be like Seth Teller. I want to work on important problems, and I want to help people. I want to support the people around me, and I want to help people find and go after their dreams. And I want to always take the time to smile and say hello.

I am grateful for every short minute I spent with Seth. For more information, here is the initial press release, the investigation update, and his personal website. I do not know the circumstances for his death, but I am very sorry for the world (and especially those closest to him) for the loss.

Adventures in Hydroponics (Weeks 2-5)

Posted on by cathywu

Day 24 (July 8, 2014)
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The watercress children got big, time to transplant! [In the meantime, I screwed up and lost a bunch of baby plants. Let’s call it survival of the fittest.]

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There we go, transplanted! So much room for roots to grow.

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I transplanted a few more babies and prototyped a tiny irrigation system. Ah yes, a series of tubes. And I’ve got my own terrace farm. 🙂

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The baby basil, California poppies, and wildflowers (new!), with their own water tubes!

Day 27 (July 11, 2014)
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Just chillin’. The previous shots were a prototype system, so I removed everything except the stakes (black water tube holders). I planted some wildflowers and chives in soil too, and the first soiling sprouted!

Day 34 (July 18, 2014)
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Oh man, the watercress is so delicious that the insects want some too!

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Basil’s starting to look like basil.

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And we’ve got some new babies (parsley)!

[Special thanks to Jacob for the prototyping bucket and to Kevin/Irena for the wildflower seeds!]

Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic

Posted on by cathywu

Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify. The New York Times reports that there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers…

The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things. As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell. Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science. It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”

The sign of the system’s alleged fairness is the set of policies that travel under the banner of “diversity.” And that diversity does indeed represent nothing less than a social revolution. … But diversity of sex and race has become a cover for increasing economic resegregation. Elite colleges are still living off the moral capital they earned in the 1960s, when they took the genuinely courageous step of dismantling the mechanisms of the WASP aristocracy.

via Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic.

This article has some really nice insights, though I think it ends on a weak note.

His addresses a humanities-oriented education. I’m not sure what his thoughts are on the sciences and engineering.

How to Berkeley: Establishing Residency

Posted on by cathywu

Actually, step 0 is to negotiate with your advisor to split the difference in the $$ that the department/someone saves by establishing residency. It could be a pretty great side-income. ..Just kidding.

The guidance / explanation they sent us is okay, but I just want to know exactly what steps are needed to get it done. Here I’ve included their guidance + annotated with my process. I also recorded the amount of time it took me to figure each step out, which should be an upper bound on the time it takes someone following these steps.

1) Submit your Statement of Legal Residence in BearFacts available NOW.

[15 minutes] It’s abbreviated as “SLR” in BearFacts. Go here and fill out the forms.

2) Please upload the following documents at: or.berkeley.edu/myresidency. PLEASE REDACT ANY SENSITIVE INFORMATION (account numbers, SSN, etc.) FOR SECURITY REASONS.

This means you have to collect a bunch of information. If you’re like me and waited until July to do this, then most of it should be done already by accident. Except for the driver’s license.

WARNING: they seem to do some sort of greedy evaluation, i.e. they evaluated my residency before I even finished submitting all my documents. To avoid this (and the subsequent petition process..), I recommend submitting all your documents at once.

– California driver’s license or state ID

[15 minutes on website, 90 minutes reviewing rules, 30 minutes transit, 60 minutes to get new license] If you have an existing driver’s license, you need to take the written driving test at the DMV to exchange it for a CA driver’s license. The website’s not the easiest to navigate, so I included some useful links here. Instructions are here.
1) Go to the CA DMV website to schedule an appointment. You want to select the “Office visit” option. To build in redundancy (since it’s nearing the deadline), I scheduled 3 appointments on 3 consecutive day. Just in case.
2) Materials for the written test are here. The test is ~30-40 questions and you are allowed 6 incorrect.
3) Stuff to bring to the DMV
– $33 Fees documented here. Bring cash because sometimes the DMV loses credit card information to hackers.
– Application form DL 44 (you fill this one out there)
– Social security card (you don’t actually need this, but you do need to know your SSN)
– Passport or birth certificate

– California voter’s registration

[10 minutes] Check your registration for Alameda here. There you can enter your address and get a pdf of your voter status. For other counties, go here.

– California motor vehicle registration (if you own a vehicle)

[0 minutes]

– 2013 federal and state taxes and W2s (for the 2013 filing year, we recommend that you file California part-year returns if you were not in the state for the entire year)

[25 minutes] Depending on how careful you want to be, you can probably skip some of these steps. Instructions are geared for OSX.
1) Redact sensitive info: Open up your tax returns and search for your social security number. Use your favorite PDF tool (e.g. Preview, Adobe Acrobat) to draw black boxes over those fields. Also search for your bank account numbers.
2) Convert to jpg: Download imagemagick (available at least for Ubuntu and OSX). Go to the directory and run:
convert -density 400 -scale 2000x1545 {FILENAME}.pdf {FILENAME}.jpg
3) Convert back to pdf:
convert {FILENAME}*.jpg {FILENAME}-jpg.pdf

– Evidence of your arrival date in CA prior to August 28, 2013 (plane ticket and/or credit card statement)

[7 minutes]
I uploaded my boarding pass for my one-way flight out from Boston to SFO. Sniffle.

– Evidence of your Summer 2014 whereabouts (this can be a memo from your department indicating your summer research plans; a letter from your employer indicating your employment status, etc.). Please note that depending on your circumstances we may pend your file for evidence of your summer whereabouts.

[5 minutes]
I uploaded the NSF “Certification of Appropriate Fellowship Activities” form, which certifies NSF to pay me for the summer because I’m doing research.

– For students born in 1991 or later and you were claimed by your parents on their taxes: documentation that you are employed 49% or more time or equivalent in university-administered funds (e.g. grants, fellowships, stipends, etc.).

[0 minutes]

3) Please note that after receiving ALL of the documents requested, it will take three to four weeks to make a final evaluation and residency determination. If you do not submit all of your documents by the documentation deadline of August 15, 2014, you will be considered a non-resident for the purposes of tuition and fees for Fall 2014.

Annnnd recording the process took about 45 minutes, for a grand total of 5 hours.. sigh.

Building blocks: how Project Ara is reinventing the smartphone | The Verge

Posted on by cathywu

The broad outlines of Project Ara have already been announced and had plenty of doubt cast on them. It’s an attempt to encourage hardware manufacturers to build modules that will slot into a metal "endoskeleton," which serves as the basic core of a phone. The camera, screen, and any other feature that you’d traditionally associate with a smartphone would exist only as a modular tile — even the processor and the power jack would be removable.

But first, you should know that Project Ara is not, technically, a phone. It’s not even that accurate to call it a project. It’s more like a mission. The end goal for ATAP is to hand off a viable product and stewardship of a hardware ecosystem to Google — Eremenko and his small team aren’t just building a series of proof-of-concept prototypes; they’re attempting to build an industry within an industry.

One of the goals is to “democratize the hardware ecosystem, break it wide open, basically disintermediate the OEMs,” Eremenko says, “so that component developers can now have privy with the consumer.”

via Building blocks: how Project Ara is reinventing the smartphone | The Verge.

Chipotle burrito phones! Project Ara is a potential hardware platform for Google products and services.

HT RJ

The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture – Quartz

Posted on by cathywu

We’re objective meritocratic folks and will violently reject any suggestion that we are not. We totally won’t “ding” you for not doing steps 1-6, we swear. But they help. Totally.

It’s astonishing how many of the people conducting interviews and passing judgement on the careers of candidates have had no training at all on how to do it well. Aside from their own interviews, they may not have ever seen one. I’m all for learning on your own, but at least when you write a program wrong, it breaks. Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and survivor bias. “Empirically,” people who wear suits don’t do well; therefore anyone in a suit is judged before they open their mouths. “On my interview I remember we did thus and so, therefore I will always do thus and so. I’m awesome and I know X; therefore anyone who doesn’t know X is an idiot.” Exceptions, also known as opportunities for learning, are not allowed to occur. This completes the circle.

Ideally you should live in “The City,” which is on a peninsula, and not on “The Peninsula,” which is in a valley.

via The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture – Quartz.

Lots of connections between this article and the house project. We also don’t know what we’re doing, know only vaguely what we’re looking for, and we certainly don’t know how to interview people. But we’re exploring the search space together and gradually expanding it (hopefully). I’m trying to be careful not to directly import people/culture blindly, akin to this “mirror-tocracy.” Diversity is good. All the analogies to startups are startling realistic.