About a month ago I started working in the
Applied Cognition and Training in Immersive Virtual Environments (ACTIVE) Lab at the Institute for Simulation and Training (IST) at UCF (Such a mouthful). It's really awesome there, and I love it. It's over in Research Park in UCFs Partnership II building. The entire building is pretty much military projects, IST takes up most of two of the five floors and then several other military labs doing smaller projects take up the other three. Because it's a very new building, it has all sorts of neat post 9/11 designs incorporated since it houses military personel. Everything from the way the windows are designed, to the way stairwells are designed to act as a buffer if something were to crash into it, to pillars and curved sidewalks to make it nearly impossible for a vehicle of any size to get close to the building, etc. The best part though is.... we have a moat around the building. At first I thought it was just a lake, no... it's primarily a moat. Lol. I work in a castle, I love it. Lol. Ever since I was a kid I wanted a moat, and this is in a weird way kinda fulfilling that dream (now if only the sidewalk for badge entrance were instead a bridge... hmmm... lol)
First off, almost everyone there either has a PhD, is working towards a PhD, or are finishing up there Masters degrees. There are nearly no undergraduates there. So, the environment could either be great or terrible... fortunately it's great. Instead of cocky people who think that you are an idiot in comparison, every single one of them is interested in sharing their knowledge with you and helping you learn. All of them view me being an undergraduate not as me being inferior to them, only as me being younger and not having the time to get to where they are yet. I really, really like that. They have already in many ways helped me replan my approach towards my graduate studies that will be coming up in a few years in ways that would probably shock most people that "know" me.
The research itself is absolutely amazing. It's so hard to describe, but essentially they are working on these very interesting ways of improving education, human-machine interaction, etc. That's such a bad way to try to explain how exciting it is, but the rabbit hole is so deep. I mean, they're working on everything from using EEGs to read brainwaves and determine emotions and thought processes to developing what will soon be a leading library for the JAUS protocol, a military protocol that will be put into place for all unmanned military vehicles in a few years. (Currently, my focus is helping assist in the development of the JAUS library) On top of that we are doing some other even cooler things with that as part of our research which is very ingenius and cool. There is a ton of research going on in various sensing equipment (such as the EEG) for working with human interfaces and the stuff they are finding is stuff nobody else has thought of doing but is revolutionary at the very least. The lab is only a year old and it is already essentially the leading research lab in the world on augmented cognition research. I seriously work at a lab that is working on reading your thoughts.... how awesome is that?
One of the nicest perks about the job is I make my own hours on-the-fly. As long as I get my hours in, and more importantly get my work done, I get to do whatever I want. Everyone there is just really cool, we all go out to eat together, several people go to the gym together, very often random groups of people will end up in the collaboration area (one of the coolest things in the building, it has dry-erase board tables! I want one for my apartment so badly) and people will share all sorts of neat ideas. Heck, last week I was teaching some of the simulation programmers astrophysics and we developed a game concept for teaching high school students physics through an applied version of this (something I'm not gonna put on here in case we do develop it). I mean, it's just really neat what everybody is trying to do.
The other groups within IST and other areas are really amazing too. The 2 guys who sit behind me in my cubicle (who I am constantly talking to) are working on their dissertations working on a simulation model that takes hundreds human psychological factors, different cultures (i.e. Americans have a natural desire to have a much larger personal bubble than many other cultures), and room design to simulate panic scenarios for room-exiting. Eventually the system could be used to improve safety and decrease the odds of people being killed in a crisis escape of a building/stadium/etc. It's still kind of primitive but seeing the way they keep putting in new psychology models and calibrating it to all sorts of video footage (people exiting church after mass, people leaving the Citrus Bowl after different types of events, etc.) they are coming up with models that are starting to become very realistic.
So, yea, I'm working on something that I think is amazing. The people are all great... the research is mind-bogglingly awesome once you get into it... and everybody there has something different to teach you and will take (literally) hours from their day to explain to you if you are curious. I can migrate within the lab to any job I'm interested in if I'd like, if I'm more interested in the research end I can transition from the stuff I am working on now more into that role. So, in many ways right now I am working on several projects all at once that are all very cool. I got really lucky with this. True, I could be paid a little bit better at some other places, but the crazy amount of freedom, top-of-the-line technology and research, and amazing group of people... I couldn't be any happier. :)
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