Injustice (2006)

It's funny, but I even forgot this existed until someone showed it to me... I don't stand behind everything I said then (but mostly... it IS true), but since it'll probably show up as the first result when searching by my name, and also since the sound's pretty messed up in it (heh, I filmed it with my camera that didn't have voice input, and then recorded the sound using sound recorder :D), I guess I'll write the verses here and hope for the best (that is, that you won't take what I said too... personal). It was made for a contest organized by Citizens for Global Solutions.

So, this is the video (it did get into the finals!):

Note: You might need to download and install Windows Media Player plugin / add-on to play inline Windows Media Player files. In my browser (Firefox) this doesn't show controls, although I've enabled them... sorry. The trick would be to maximize the window by double-clicking, and then scroll up to turn volume to max... Controls work in Internet Explorer, so you could use that!

Also: I added this sound file I recorded tonight to this page... You can only listen to it if controls work in your browser...

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And the poem:

Injustice

by Adina Stoica

We fight for rights: the right to speak, the right to learn, the right to choose;
Each day we feel betrayed by others--
We ask for social justice for ourselves, we never think of others.
We never care that we're denying them the basic rights we love so much...
We think we're masters of the world: as such
We do not give a damn on what they lose.

'Bipeds in suits, that's what you are, it's all about what you achieve.
Intelligence for you is finding ways to waste our futures fast;
You kill, destroy, and do not care whether the Earth survives your generation;
You steal our rights to have our planet clean, that's what you are: you thief!
You call yourself a human? Well, we are humans too... We're just
Humans today that have no suits: humans tomorrow without chance--
We're praying for salvation...'

'We are your children, we're children of the world, and children of this Earth,
We seek the rights your generation is denying us from birth:
The right to a clean Earth, no litter on the street,
The right to a clean air, no matter where we breathe,
The right to have green forests, the right to have a pet,
Radiation-free homes, and... the right to get fat..'

Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, we'd better think of others,
Should think about poor children, believe that they are ours!
Be careful what we're doing, be selfless with the Earth,
More resources we're wasting, their future's getting worse!
More forests we are cutting, less oxygen emitted,
More factories we're building, more cars we're using,
Less air to breathe, and we all need it!
More animals we're killing, less smiles on children's faces,
Experiments with atoms, mean cancer in most cases--
More resources we waste, the more they're losing...

All things we hurt? We drive them to their end,
The things destroyed? We cannot mend...

Okay, so again, I am not trying to offend anyone by this (note be taken, by suits I actually meant adults, well, adults with power, but mainly adults). But it is still out there, would appear in your search as one of the main results, and also, well, I did it. And it means something. For all of us.

This brings me to my idea (to save the world of course). But this isn't the time or the place to write about it. It's basically opposite to the last sentence in the poem, it's about us all trying to save the world together... I wonder if it may be that simple... But it's based on the principle that more minds are better than one. So, we'll see, that is the plan...

And... this post also brings writing poetry to mind... something I haven't done in so long... But maybe I'll do it soon :D I miss that feeling of creating something. Though I was such a kid then...

CCSCNE Programming Competition

The northeastern region of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, or CCSCNE, holds a conference under the same name every Spring in a college in the northeast of the United States. Last year's conference, CCSCNE 2008, was held April 11 - 12, 2008 at Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, while this year's conference, CCSCNE 2009, was held April 24 - 25, 2009 at SUNY Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY.

The conference hosts workshops, poster sessions and an ACM-like Computer Programming Contest. Although most of the workshops are faculty-targeted, I found the poster session to be pretty interesting [I'm considering participating next year], and the programming competition, well, exciting!

A team from Bard College, of which I was part, joined the past two conferences for the programming competition. The team was composed of Wayne Yu Wu, Maksim Tsikhanovich and myself, and we had as advisers professor Robert McGrail last year (2008), and professor Sven Anderson this year (2009). A picture of the team, taken this year, follows below:

The programing contest involves teams of students coding solutions to a list of 5 problems on one computer (that is, only one computer per 3 people, so you have to take turns solving the problems on paper and submitting them). You get your result immediately (whether the solution you submitted works for all the test cases), and you are scored for the sum of the times you solved the problems in. Re-submissions are allowed, without any penalty other than the time you lost submitting it, getting the result, figuring it out and re-submitting. Coding is done in Java, C, or C++. We did it in Java, as Maksim was better than us at the actual coding and his strength was Java... And Java and C are pretty alike, so I could code my part [with some help].

I don't really know what number we ended in 2008, as we left the competition before the banquet, but this year we solved all the problems and ended up number 7 out of 29 (due to the time it took us to figure out bugs in the program)... which is pretty decent anyway...

I can just hope we can do better next year. Oh, yes, and maybe a poster next year too, featuring my research at UH or my research at Bard, or maybe two posters :)

The ECHO adventure

ECHO happened whole I was still in high school. It was the student company I was president of. A student company is just like a real company, but it's run by students. The name stands for Earning through Curiosity, Honesty and Originality, and the slogan was "Up to the peak". Our company produced HanRuc, an anorak that can be turned into a backpack and the other way around. We got first prize in the Student Company Competition in Romania, and attended the European finals in Interlaken, Switzerland. ECHO was probably my greatest achievement before I got accepted to College.

You can view our website above or check out this link.

My work for the Intelligent Robots Workshop

This happened freshman year, but I thought I should start this blog by showing what I've been working on in the past too, so as to make it as chronological (and complete) as possible. So here it goes: the robotics class. The recompiled version of what I submitted at the end of the semester.

Before the RKC Opening:

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  Mapping team.

  • I was on the mapping team and made the lobby and Lab map. We measured the lab and the lobby, used the building plans and drew the map using Mapper3Basic, a program which is used to make maps our robot understands. The program uses lines to denote walls or detectable surfaces and forbidden lines and areas to denote spaces where the robot shouldn't go. We also set a home spot (the green area in the lab).
    
    
    
    
    
    
  
  
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  Poster-making person.

  • Adrian and I thought the concept out and made the poster in PowerPoint. Unfortunately the PowerPoint was too small so I had to remake the whole thing the following morning. I named the robot Scavengex and somebody added stone robot- I left it that way-- I thought it sounded interesting. Each of the teams added details about the work they've been doing and we also added a Future Goals section. All in all, I believe it was a very nice poster.
    
    
    
    
    
    
  
  

During the RKC Opening:

I was very active during the RKC opening. I was always around Scavengex, made demonstrations with him and was around to force-stop it if it malfunctioned. Which indeed happened, as it attacked somebody's leg . I was quite unhappy we weren't able to show Reem and Kayden the robot's proper appreciation by making it go in the place where it would say "Thank you, Reem and Kayden for giving me a home!" but they enjoyed the robot anyway. And I liked the RKC opening .

After the RKC opening:

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  Learning some C++.

  
  
  
  I have started with basic C++ learning but stopped at about chapter 10 realizing that this is so much like C combined with Java that if I needed to know anything else I will just look it up. So I gave up on that. And moved on.
  
  
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  Aria and Vislib integration.

  
  
  
  I am working on integrating Aria and Vislib right now. I almost got it working. I've compiled it and it's working. I just have to figure out how to simulate my program and test it. Then we'll integrate my program with the GUI-server program and we'll have a robot that's not blind anymore. Yay! (Although he only sees in grayscale.) UPDATE! I managed to make the program work, I tested it and the robot "SEES". Also, I saw that it sees color, so we are actually making progress. I had some problems with compling the code, so I'll document it on the wiki.
  
  
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  Speech recognition.

  
  
  
  Also, I have installed Sphinx and am working on speech recognition. I have learned about HMMs and am planning to have our robot act somewhat intelligently. It will ask humans yes and no questions and act accordingly. Maybe later it would be able to answer human questions or even handle a more intelligent conversation. Unfortunately, the microphone doesn't seem to work in Fedora right now... I have documented the errors I got, on the wiki.
  
  

So, now you're probably wondering what the RKC is and what was the "opening" about. RKC stands for the "Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation", and is basically Bard's science building, the place where the computer science faculty have their offices and where all the computer science classes are. It also houses biology and chemistry. The "opening" was organized as the inauguration ceremony of this new building, and my class prepared a demonstration of our project for it. To read more about the RKC, check this link. To see some pictures from the opening ceremony, check this and this links.