Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

Gender, scientists, and reductionism: Why Vassar is special

This fall, for the first time in four years, I'm not returning to Vassar. What better time to muse on the college's specialness?

Over the summer, a couple divisions became more apparent to me than they had been previously:

1. Gender in technology fields - I worked in a lab at NASA Goddard of fifty-some interns/apprentices with a large number of mentors who dropped in on a regular basis. I was the only female on my project; I generally worked in a room with fifteen guys. Only one of the mentors I knew was female, and she was a professor from a collaborating university, not from NASA.

   I should emphasize that the difference I'm focusing on here is not in treatment but in sheer numbers. Why is it that fewer women end up in technology fields? The fact that so many prominent organizations focus on promoting women in technology -- including WIT, the Women in Technology project, NCWIT, and of course the Grace Hopper Celebration, which I attended last year -- suggests there's a problem. It's at the point where it doesn't even feel weird to be the only female in the room. Is there something wrong with that?

2. Science vs engineering - I mentioned this recently. There is a clear division between those who have been trained as scientists and those trained as engineers. Yes, each have their own goals and purposes, but why isn't there more crossover?

3. Reductionism vs dualism - As elaborated in one of the first essays I wrote here, I'm not a dualist. A prominent place to find dualisms is in many of the world's fine religions. Some of the conversations I had with people this summer have accentuated just how different that point of view is from my own.

The fact that I noticed these differences now -- not during a previous summer or semester -- highlights just how special a place Vassar is, and how different being at an undergraduate liberal arts college is from being in the rest of the world.

My closest friends at Vassar were also non-dualists; Vassar's mix of genders is unique enough to begin with that the ratio in technology-related majors continues to be unique; Vassar lacks an engineering department and is generally full of scientists.

The rest of the world has different ratios of people and mixes of beliefs. I'm finding it fascinating to explore.

A month after graduation, I'm well on my way to learning all sorts of crazy new things. This summer, I'm learning about...

• HAM radio. On Tuesday, I attended the first of a summer-long amateur radio FCC licensing class. I know very little about radios and their components - the president of GSFC's amateur radio club told a story about how easy it was to build a circuit to convert 5 volts down to 3.3 volts, and kept throwing out electronics jargon. I'm looking forward to increasing my knowledge of the subject!

• Computer innards. On a similarly technical note, my laptop's hard drive stopped spinning up last week. With the help of a computer engineering friend, I opened up the laptop and replaced the drive. Didn't even lose a screw! It's a small step into the world of computer hardware, but that was the first time I've opened up a computer, so it counts for a lot.

• Multiple realizability. That is, that people can take entirely different paths to the same place. People with ridiculously different beliefs can still be thinking exactly the same thing at exactly the same time on ridiculously frequent occasions.

• Tae Kwon Do. An activity I'd never done before: martial arts! All the interns/apprentices in my lab this summer were encouraged to try it out, since the GSFC club is so friendly. We've learned miscellaneous self-defense maneuvers and more ways of kicking than I remember names for - I even got to kick through a board!

• And software... My lab group is using a variety of software tools and open source code libraries that are new to me: ROS (the Robot Operating System), a code repository via SVN, the MRPT libraries, the point cloud library (PCL), and many more. I'm remembering C++, delving into path planning algorithms, and reading up on SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). Yes, it's a whirlwind of acronyms.

Don't ever stop

This one's a life update post, but it's also a "here's some cool science!" post.

A few days ago, I graduated from Vassar College with a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science and a correlate in Computer Science. I was decorated with general honors, departmental honors, membership to Psi Chi, and membership to Sigma Xi. My time there was awesome.

What's next?

No lazy summer!

Well, no lazy summer break for me! I've already spent three days in my summer lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, where I'll be working on a number of software development projects. The primary one is a LIDAR-assisted robotic group exploration project, in which we're going to have a small fleet of robots -- a mothership and some workerbots -- use 3D LIDAR data to autonomously map and plot paths through an area. This kind of robot fleet could, eventually, be used to explore other planets. One of the big challenges will be dealing with the 3D image data. I'm looking forward to learning more image processing algorithms!

Another project is the redesign of the Greenland Robotic Vehicle, a big autonomous rover that'll drive across Greenland, collecting a data about snowfall, mapping, and exploring. Did you know there's ice on that country two miles thick? I may also get to play with a robot that has stereo vision.

You can see some of these robots (and what life in the lab may be like) in this great video about last year's interns.

So far, I've met a bunch of intelligent, friendly folks, started catching up on already-written code, and begun to delve into the platforms, libraries, and algorithms we'll be using and developing this summer. Our mentors have already proven themselves to be enthusiastic and helpful. Just yesterday, one of them told us,

"You're engineers at NASA. You want to go where things are, and then go beyond."

That may end up being our theme for the summer.

A little overwhelming?

There's going to be so much going on. It'd be easy to get overwhelmed -- especially now, jumping in and floundering around in the code, the projects, the people. So much to learn.

But as I sat in the lab today, reading about ROS, going through tutorials, reading about PCL and feature detection in point clouds, digging through last summer's confusing pile of C# and C++ programs, I realized I wasn't overwhelmed. And it was because of all the other experiences I've had that've gotten me to this point.

Confidence. My first URSI summer, flailing through Microsoft Robotics Studio and complicated conceptual theories. Figuring out how to deal with webcams and image data my second URSI summer, reading papers on optical flow and implementing algorithms. Last summer: excavations of an open source flight simulator, the Aeronautics Student Forum, dealing with different work styles and communication styles in my LARSS lab. And more.

I think about all those experiences, and I'm not afraid of this summer. I could almost be overwhelmed -- perhaps thinking that everyone else has more of the right kind of experience; I wasn't trained as a classic engineer -- but I know I can succeed. My non-engineering, cognitive science background sets me apart and lets me look at problems a little differently than everyone else. I'm an asset.

I know how to learn. I know how to do research.

I can conquer this summer.

An awesome NASA summer internship

Summarizing 10 weeks is difficult in any circumstances, but when those weeks are spent as an intern in the Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars program, working at a NASA center with a ton of awesome people, it's even more difficult.

But I'll try.

I worked with a systems engineering team to develop and integrate the software and hardware needed for comparable indoor and outdoor tests of autonomous, unmanned multi-vehicle flight control.

In plain English, that means we were developing ways of testing flying robots both inside and outside.

Ten interns, including me, were in the lab on workdays. That was not counting our mentor, Garry D. Qualls, or the slew of friends and colleagues who drop by on a frequent—if irregular—basis. Most are engineers of some variety; the others are pursuing degrees with the word "computer" in the title.

Me, I'm a cognitive scientist.

I hail from Northern California and attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Although my academic focus has been on embodied agents and robotics applications of cognitive science, I've studied with Vassar's multidisciplinary stew of psychologists, biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and computer scientists.

During my first week at Langley, it quickly became clear to me that my coursework had not prepared me to do all the things my lab's engineers could do. I had not studied mechanics, controls or circuits. I was not a whiz at soldering, nor did I understand the intricacies of aeronautics.

What I could do, however, was be versatile.

I programmed microcontrollers in C and C++, then switched to Java to write code to parse and display real-time data. I evaluated possible ground control station software options, dug through an open source flight simulator and covered the lab's white boards with organizational diagrams. When it was time to develop communication links between more than six different programs, I eagerly helped decipher network protocols and data packets.

I even chased our miniature Parking Lot Exploration Rover across the pavement in 105-degree weather while testing a navigation algorithm.

Most of my time at Langley, no matter what the activity, was spent learning. My lab mates have remarkable skill-sets, and we're all willing to share our expertise.

Our electrical engineers taught me not to fear wires and breadboards. I began to understand the theory behind PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controls with the help of our aerospace engineers, drawing on distant memories of calculus and knowledge of behavior-based robotics algorithms.

In return, I helped lab mates sort through debugging messages and null pointer exceptions, while occasionally spouting interesting facts about brains. I spent some quality time with software. I'm graduating from Vassar in the spring with a minor in computer science in addition to my cognitive science major. This summer's work has solidly demonstrated that knowing the syntax isn't the same as using it in meaningful ways.

But working in Garry Qualls' lab is not just about acquiring technical skills and applying knowledge learned in classrooms.

With so many interns tackling parts of the same project, communication is crucial. We've all had to learn to deal with each other. Our respective idiosyncrasies and backgrounds sometimes make that difficult. More than once, I found that a lab mate was simply looking at a problem from a different point of view than I was—a view that, prior to our disagreement, I hadn't thought to question.

I enjoyed having the opportunity to re-examine my perspective and those previously unrecognized assumptions.

This summer has been fantastic. I got to see my lab transition from conducting chaos to smoothly functioning as a team as we worked together to establish an autonomous vehicle testing facility.

Inside, an infrared camera system tracked the vehicles. Data from this system and from the vehicles was fed to navigation controllers, a flight management system and real-time visual displays. Outside, after we swapped the camera system for a differential GPS system, we could run the exact same tests with the vehicles.

My experience as a LARSS intern has been inspiring. I'm not entirely sure where I'm headed next—graduate school, that enigmatic first job after college, writing the next great sci-fi novel—but it'll have to be fantastic to beat this summer.

—

This article originally appeared on NASA Langley Research Center Researcher News, August 18, 2010

In late July, a solicitation went out to all the Langley summer interns requesting that ten or so people write articles about their summer experiences. It arrived in my inbox alongside the usual selection of notifications, casual correspondence, and informative messages about upcoming activities. I almost passed it by, thinking someone else will respond. It occurred to me, however, that I know how to write. I could thread a story of my summer experiences into an entertaining and cohesive narrative of 500-750 words. So I did.

The article I wrote about my LARSS internship for the Langley Researcher News is up at An Intern's Story: A Time to Test Flying Robots.

I encourage you to take a look!