For the last few weeks I have been involved with Penn’s Research Experience for Teachers program (RET). The 6 week NSF funded program paired 10 teachers from local high schools in Philadelphia with a research engineer at Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception (GRASP) laboratory at Penn and an industry mentor in an effort to expose these teachers to advanced engineering concepts that they could take back to their students.
I had the pleasure to help with Matthieu Lecce and Danelle Ross on an effort to use computer vision to detect the volume of transparent liquid in a glass container. The project built on previous effort by Matthieu and the research team on seeing glassware (more information on that research can be found here). Technically Philly did a great writeup on their site as well on the final day of the project.
The program was really intense for the teachers and major props to Danelle for completing it and going through this intense learning experience. My own contribution was fairly limited as I spent only a couple of hours a week with the team answering how groups like Comcast Innovation Labs (where I work) investigate such technology and how machine vision is being used in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, a domain I am currently very involved in at the lab.
More than anything though, it was a great learning experience for me. I learnt a lot of new concepts on how machine vision is approached (my only real experience with raw machine vision previously had been some OpenCV experiments in Processing and some half complete Android projects with face detection). Learning the core concepts that go into machine vision and the current state of the art in that field was a great experience.
Sometimes I really miss grad school.
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