Week One
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Week One: Talking to Android

I spent my first week at Princeton getting acquainted with Dr. Martonosi's lab and with Android. We had our first weekly meeting on Tuesday to toss around ideas for a project, and she liked my idea of a cell phone translator so we're going with that. We've decided that I will press on with Google Android, though it's a bit difficult now since there are no phones built to run the Android OS at the moment. Hopefully, with all the information about phone hackery out there on the Internet, I'll patch together an Android phone with a webcam for video input sometime along the way.

My first order of business for the translator application was to find a good OCR engine; after taking one course on artificial intelligence, I knew it would be difficult (though interesting!) work to write a computer vision program from scratch. It did not take too much prodding to find tesseract, a wonderful open-source OCR engine that performs much better than I expected on the sample images of highway signs I rounded up for testing. Being specialized for recognizing characters in scanned documents, it cannot handle perfectly the skew and other weirdness introduced in camera phone pictures, so I will be spending the next week or so figuring out some ways to preprocess images to be straight, of uniform size, and of good enough fore-/background contrast to be used effectively by tesseract.

So far I really enjoy being at Princeton for the summer. I worried about not having much to do or many people to see, but I'm glad to have been proven wrong. The grad students in the lab are very nice, and I was happy to be invited to their end of the year party at Dr. Martonosi's house on Wednesday. Since I got here so early, by Princeton terms, I could not live in the student apartments on campus, so I am renting a room in a house in nearby Hopewell. I think this has worked out for the better; my room is much bigger than I would have had otherwise, and my housemates, Erika (who owns the house) and Sharrad (who also rents) are great. I am so thankful to have a kitchen to use as well. On Friday I made a pie with strawberries and rhubarb I got from an orchard that's less than 10 minutes away from our house (for a city girl, that's surprising and awesome!) and was happy to share some with Erika and her friend Deborah. As food-nerdy as it sounds, I am excited to be working local produce into my summer cooking.