The lab that makes the "Future" video

So I’ve mostly been writing about my weekend excursions in Berlin so far and I have one in the back burner for my Paris visit. But I think it might be more interesting to talk about I’ve learned from HPI over the last few weeks.

So it’s been about 4 weeks since I’ve started! Oh wow… So far it’s been great working with this wacky group. Coming here was a great decision. This is my first foray into HCI research and it’s been both refreshing and utterly frustrating at times. The group’s agenda is to project what the next thing in 10-20 years will be. It’s almost as if they are building the next “What the future will be” concept video that Microsoft loves to make. Patrick Baudisch is relentless on his students when it comes to not settling any less than the super future. He seems to veer towards that once he understands a new concept and has demonstrated it to the world, it is time to throw it away and work on something else. I'm not sure if I fully agree with this way of working, but it does seem to force the lab to always continue to discover instead of polishing an old idea just to have another paper for the next conference. There was actually a series of lecture/invited talk yesterday talking about what is worth publishing and what is a good research topic. Highly thought provoking, but I will save that for the next post.

Something that also is completely new to me is their process of brainstorming. Almost every other day there would be a brainstorming session. After a quick overview on the topic for the session, everyone would have a stack of 3x5 index cards and 5-10 minutes to draw and fantasize about the topic. Everyone then presents their ideas and group them in a way that somehow weaves a complete story.

 I found it really difficult to force myself to think of ideas that were none obvious and actually found this process to be kind of annoying. I tend to enjoy a more organic process of discovering ideas, either through random hall way chatting or simply when I’m sitting around and have an interesting revelation. Nonetheless, I have gained some interesting insights through forcing myself to think outside the norm. It is particularly beneficial for finding a different research topic however. Through this engagement, sometimes you spark conversations outside the meeting or,and find a solution to a problem that’s been bugging you. Often times the conversation tend towards a philosophical nature, which is quite interesting. There is definitely merit to this method and I plan to incorporate this. Probably more sparingly though.

That being said, after 4 weeks, I have yet to completely converge on a project because of the high expectation for a project that is “worth doing.” It does seem like I have more or less decided on a project to do with the other intern from Austria, Alexandra Ion. We shall see how it goes.  

The Berlin "Bratswurst"

So I promise I will stop updating my blog in bulks. But for now, I am going to update you all on my last weekend before I chat about my wonderful weekend in Paris.

Last weekend was quite lively in Berlin. On Friday there was the Fete de la Musique, which I unfortunately missed out on since I got out of work way too late. But I heard that there were concerts all over Berlin and it would have been amazing  :(  Saturday was the annual Christopher Street Day, which is one of the biggest pride parade in Berlin each year. But the festivities didn’t really start until midafternoon so instead I did another skateboarding tour of the city. The roads were cleared out for the parade, so I took to the middle of the road.

Street musician. Sorry about the blurriness....

I made my way to Potsdamer Platz, where the old Berlin wall use to stand (aka. Super touristy area). There was a “officer” manning a booth where you can get all the passport visa stamps you needed for Berlin back when it was divided. As I passed the guy I vaguely heard him speak French. Immediately after, he turned around and spoke Spanish to a group of teenagers. And looked at me and started speaking English. I was quite impressed. So I stayed for a bit and chatted with him. Turns out he used to be a skateboarder, but after some serious injuries decided it wasn’t worth it anymore. So because of that, he told me I was smart to wear a helmet and should definitely keep wearing it. HAHA smart…right… I already had to spend 2k doing that CT Scan back in Freshman year after getting that concussion… 

Afterwards, I decided to head to a German/English Language exchange. Figured it would be good since I’ve been in Germany for 2 weeks and still only know the bare minimum to show that I am not deaf. The exchange was hosted at this very hipster café by these two British teachers, Tom and Cilia. Turns out there are alot of British people hanging out in Berlin. Most of the English speakers were British musicians trying to make a life in Berlin. We did our language games for awhile and then had some beer and chatted. I had one of the most memorable beers ever. It was called Bier Bier. 

Anyways, so it was finally time to go to the parade. Turns out the parade part was done, and now it’s just a massive street party. Well still cool I guess.

Anyways, forget the parade, I got a better story. So as I was walking towards the parade, an Asian guy came up to me and asked for some direction to the parade. I told him I was headed the same way and we can just walk there together. He gave me a surprised look and said “oh, I don’t see many gay Asians.” And I laughed and said, “oh no, I’m not gay.” But Rommel, the guy, said “you mean not yet ;)” oops…. Miki, who was on the other end of the phone at the time laughed quite hard at this exchange. Anyways, I kept chatting with Rommel, figured it would be more fun going through the parade with someone anyways. But as we walked, he started making me quite uncomfortable. He kept asking if I wanted to try things like going into the bush and that he knows a bunch of guys who would be into me. Now, I am very open minded about homosexuality and am good friends with a bunch, but this I thought was definitely overstepping some boundaries. I decided it was too far when he offered some “Bratswurst,” which I now think aptly describes the Berlin gay scene.  Well I sort of booked it out of there after that. Turns out my lab mate, Sean, has had a similar experience in the park. He was reading one day till quite late on a park bench when a guy approached him and asked if he can suck his cock. Turns out it was THE gay park that sees a lot of sexual activity at night. Not sure what’s up with this, but something seems a bit off… Well as awkward as that was, at least I have some interesting story about Bratswurst.

Brian's is in Berlin!

So Brian and Cassie are visiting Germany for the month so we met up for some drinks and dinner last night. Don't think he had that in his plans when he first planned his trip for Germany, but well, I think he's accepted by this point that  I would pull some random crap like ending up in Berlin for the summer. Anyways, I bailed from work a bit early and joined him in Friedrichstrasse. Saw a bunch of Asian people on the way actually. I definitely get the feeling that when the asians see each other in the train, we take a few looks at each other thinking "huh, I wonder what you're doing here..."

Anyways, so we met up and had dinner by the river. Brian, who supposedly knows German, completely drops the ball on the first round of bier ordering. Some how we ordered a beer that was mixed with green apple syrup. It was more like italian soda with a beer after taste. Needless to say, I did not like it. But at least I finished it. Cassie refused to drink even half of it. So for the next round we went with the safe bet of Hefeweissen.

As for the meal, we got pretty adventurous. Cassie ordered this "Grilled black pudding" which turned out to be made of pork blood. Brian ordered Grilled pork knuckles. I ordered some "sour beef" with potato dumplings. I didn't get the picture of all our dishes, but here's a group shot. Once I get the picture from Cassie I'll post another one of each of our dishes.

I would definitely say my favorite dish was the blood sausage. It was quite delicious. Well, we parted pretty early since Brian and Cassie needed to catch the 6 am train to Prague and they still needed to do some laundry.

To end this post, I think I'll talk about my ride back from work today since it didn't seem to warrant a post of its own. So after a pretty normal day at work, I came home on the train early again but this time was to avoid the impending thunderstorm. Well, on my way home, some Turkish street musicians got on the train and began playing music for the train. I'll post their jovial tunes in a bit. I tipped them a euro since it seemed a bit sad that no one else seemed to gave a shit about them. So all in all, pretty good week. :D

First week at HPI

So I was gonna post about my first day at HPI but then I was so jetlagged the first day that I got lazy. But anyways, it's Thursday now. So my first day at HPI was great. I arrived around 9 am or so. 

Well it turns out no one really starts work until 10:30 - 11??? So I ended up pushing back my day a bit for the rest of the week. It's working out a bit better. The day started off with a bit of awkward silence as the lab admin led me into the lab area,.with  neither of us knowing enough of the other persons language. At this point we kind of just acknowledge that we probably won't be the best of buds, but that's ok. Well Stefanie did a lab tour for me and a few of her friend's visiting from Wendy Mackay's lab in Inria Paris to start my day off. I got to see a bunch of cool projects such as GravitySpace, Constructable, LaserOrigami, and a few masters projects like a ARdrone that carries your phone in front of you while you run and walk around. After all that well, I got my office! Super nice space with huge windows. 

The rest of the day consisted of me attending meeting after meeting. First I went to a presentation by a Korean masters student, Jaeyoon, who had studied in Tokyo University and so has a vastly different education background as those in Germany. So the presentation was really for the rest of the team to get to know him. Well, guess what, I found out I to had to give the same presentation too. So I just went off of my portfolio. Worked out pretty well even though it's been a whlie since I've given a presentation. 

I sat in on a bunch of different meetings and brainstorming session after that. This place really gives me the whole "Design Thinking" vibe. Cool but I sometimes feel like I can't quite keep up with the generation of mmm might I say random ideas. Seems like I am much better at seeing breakthroughs and make a random idea into something better. Well I suppose maybe I'm just a bit rusty and once I get to work, my brain will kick back in. 

For the rest of the week, my days have been pretty much filled with reading conference proceedings from CHI and UIST for the last few years. My experience with HCI is so limited that I definitely find that I don't have a good sense of what the whole world is up to. When I am talking to other PhD students about ideas, they often name drop big names in HCI and I feel a bit awkward when I have no clue who they are talking about. Though for once it feels pretty great that everyone knows who I will be working with and are very excited to hear that I will be joining the UW ubicomp lab with Shwetak. So my agenda for the week is to read and read and read about HCI and all the previous work and new and upcoming work. Otherwise, I'm also constantly finding myself in hallway/kitchen talks with Patrick and other students talking about ideas I'm seeing and thinking of. I'm hoping that by tomorrow I'll have a decent idea of what I will want to pursue for the rest of the summer. It's looking like it'll either be in the space of Natural User Interfaces combined with mid-air haptics or haptic feedback combined with fabrication. Hopefully my thoughts will solidify a bit more tomorrow. 

Cheapest city in western europe

So my first weekend in Berlin is going quite amazingly. I made some last minute changes and had canceled my apartment in hopes to live with some others instead of in solidarity in some apartment. I could live with some lab mates for July, but that leaves June and August for me to find somewhere else. So for now I'm at a hostel.

The hostel So far is proving to be a great idea. My roommate Julius is a German web developer who is traveling around. Fun guy and gave me some pointers for seeing Berlin.  So with his advice I explored the major tourist places on Saturday,  including Alexanderplatz and Reigstag Parliament building. Though I had cut my day short to go back to the hostel for a festivity to celebrate the building's 100 yr birthday and a chance for a raffle to get my stay for free. Well didn't get it but owell. 

While manning the free preseco and bruchetta  bar, I met this Irish fine arts couple, Kevin and Fem, here in Berlin on a one way ticket to explore the art of Berlin while still not having found a place to stay semi long term.  Quite ballsy if you ask me. But I suppose my situation isn't much better now I think about it. A guy from Indiana joined us in a bit and we chatted for hours over some absurdly cheap beer.  At some 6+ drinks in I decided to show the Irish folks the great game of beer pong.  It was probably the saddest game ever since we had to play with these small coffee cups which was simply impossible to make. The only redeeming quality of the game ended up being Fem's suggestion to take a swig of beer everytime  you miss a shot. These Irish people sure can drink! Well it was a great night.

Sunday I took it quite easy. Turns out everything aside from restaraunt are closed on Sunday as it is the day to relax. At around 2pm I went out for some Chinese food I saw the day before and thoroughly enjoyed the fried duck and veggies cooked up by the Cantonese owner. We chatted in mandarin for a while and  he told me about Berlin's cheap prices and school systems.

Afterwards I grabbed my longboard and skated aimlessly toward a general direction.  Ended up at a Turkish flea market and ended up buying  myself a man purse for 10 euros. Later on I went to the big park in Tiergarten and it seemed like everyone in Berlin was having picnics and rolling around the grass making out.

Chocolate is in the Air

So to start my journey off, I venture to the land of chocolate and waffles for a 11 hour layover. It was a beautiful day in Brussels, which made the Grand Place all the more fantastic.

Now someone has pointed out on Facebook that I am no huge fan of sweets,  but it is still quite fascinating walk around being surrounded by the smell of chocolate. My favorite part however was my beers at Delirium Cafe. They hold the Guinness World record with 2000+ beers in their pub. Quite impressive. I had a chimay triple,  and delirium tremens. Both were wonderfully strong despite being quite light in color.

The 11 hour layover was both a brilliant and horrible idea though. I sort of forgot about the little hurdle called jetlag when you travel a bit far. By about 6 hours into the day,  I was feeling dreadful.  So I cut my afternoon short and headed back to the airport So I don't accidentally fall asleep at the curbside cafe where I was having some stewed beef and yet another beer. But thankfully I made it back and did end up making it to Berlin.

HCI research in Berlin??

Well I decided to follow this trend of people putting up blogs for their abroad studies. Though I'm already in Berlin, I suppose I could back track a bit and keep you all updated. 

So why Berlin? Well a while back I posted on my Facebook about this project called Constructable,  where a laser cutter was given cutting instructions through a combination of a laser pointer and computer vision. I had stumbled upon it while looking for somewhere to apply for the PhD.  Well I never figured out where the project was being done So o gave up then. But when I was visiting UW for admit weekend,  I happened to have joined Lilian DeGreef to a hci talk. When  the speaker, professor Patrick Baudisch, flashed a picture of one of his student, Stefanie Mueller,  and said he will be talking about her work for Constructables, I almost fell out of my chair.  After the talk I went up and jokingly asked about an internship and well long story short, I got the job. And So for the next three months, I'll be doing some exciting HCI research over at Hasso Plattner Institut.

Not quite sure what I'll be doing yet but I really hope to join Stefanie on her rapid prototyping work. Guess I'll find out on Monday.