Using Scratch To Teach Programming

Amongst MIT Media Lab's awesome creations, is their Scratch project. With Scratch, you can easily  program your own stories, games, and animation. This tool helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. It is being used in schools to teach computer programming to kids.
I messed around with Scratch and created a simple maze game. The drag and drop based coding functionality makes it really easy to use. I absolutely loved it.
Scratch lets you create sprites that you use in your games as characters/backgrounds etc, or for your animations and stories. For my maze game, I created two sprites- 1) a smiley face, which I used as the character that will move through the maze 2) a maze, a path through which I will move the smiley face character. The sprites can be shrunk and enlarged as required. So, I shrunk the smiley character to make it fit the maze path.

Scratch has eight categories of ready to use programming features/statements. The categories are color coded to differentiate each from the other.

1. Motion - To move the sprites 
2. Variables - To create variables in your code
3. Control - Implementation of if/else, while, for, or what to do if an onclick/key press event occurs 
4. Sensing - For checking for events such as one color touching another, button/key press etc
5. Operators - For checking for logical operators, or performing other mathematical operations such as addition, modulo etc
6. Looks - For changing the physical appearance of sprites, or displaying alerts etc.
7. Sounds - For playing sounds or changing the volume
8. Pen - For changing the pen settings

To start programming, you click the sprite on which you want to add the functionality, and start dragging the relevant programming statements into the script area.
The very first step in the maze game is to specify when to start the game. In order to start the game whenever the green flag is clicked, I drag the following statement to the script region.

Next, whenever the game is started, the smiley character should move to a specific location. Therefore, I set the x and y coordinates of the smiley sprite to 75 and 85 respectively to always have it on a specific location in front of the maze.

Next, I implement the logic of moving the smiley character in left, right, up, and down directions. To do this, I drag an if block (control feature) for each of the four directions and move the smiley character by 15 pixels (using motion feature) respectively in a particular direction if the corresponding key is pressed (using sensing feature).

At the same time, I want to ensure that the character does not move through the lines in the maze. Otherwise, the game would be of no use. To do this, I will use a statement from the looks category and check for the instances when the smiley character touches the black color of the maze. If it does, the character should not move.

Lastly, the user can keep playing until they hit the space bar. Therefore, the if blocks are placed inside the repeat until space bar is pressed block.

Leveraging Social Media in Your Job Search

Today, I attended an inspiring talk by Lindsay Pollak on how to use Social Media in your job search process. Lindsay is an author of New York Times best-seller Becoming the Boss: New Rules for the Next Generation of LeadersLindsay started her talk with the following quote:

Small choices make big impression

Never eat alone - Keith Ferrazzi

Here's a quick summary of the points she mentioned in her talk.

1. Build your personal brand

The first and the most important tip is building your personal brand. Lindsay gave the following advice on this:

Visibility- You must have a positive online presence. You should be findable online through the professional networks such as LinkedIn.

Differentiation- What makes you unique and stand out from the crowd. What are you known for or can offer which others can't

Consistency- Is your image consistent across all social media and your in-person persona. Keep in mind that every touch point makes a difference because job hunt is very competitive. 

Authenticity- Are you genuine in your image and your outreach to peopleShe advised the audience to have a compelling headline in their LinkedIn profile by mentioning three things-- 1.What are you doing right now, 2. What do you wanna do and 3. What makes you differentShe also advised to use these three things everywhere else. Moreover, the LinkedIn summary should be at the most 300 words. Also, make sure to include your LinkedIn profile's link in your email signature.

Mini Exercise

Write 3 keywords you would like to be known for your career

2. Enhance your expertise

Do your research about the company. That makes you stand out from the crowd in many ways. For example, at a career fair when you go an talk to a recruiter. You can conduct research by following companies/ prospective employers on social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn. This gives you the latest information about the company that you can use to talk about to the recruiters.Lindsay narrated an interesting story about a guy who landed his dream job at a company which does not advertise its jobs or participates in career fairs. Since he had no contacts with the employers at the company, he achieved it by closely following the company/potential employer's news for sometime on Twitter. This helped him getting in touch with the employers and finally hiring him.

Mini Exercise

List 10 employers you wanna follow on twitterList 5 professionals you admire and commit to following

3. Network with your neighbors

If you are not good at networking, start with people you already know. So that when you are looking for job, they know about it and they might be able to connect you to someone they know who might be helpful to you.Lindsay also suggested to connect with the alumni connections of your school on LinkedIn;they might be the most helpful to you since they were in your shoes once. When connecting, make sure to customize the personal message.

Mini Exercise
List 20 friends, colleagues, and alumni you want to connect on LinkedIn

4. Apply old school etiquette

Always carry business cards at networking events so that the recruiters can remember you because you handed them something they can remember to look at in order to remember you.Moreover, be excellent on the phone. Have an appropriate voicemail, and be sure to check the voicemails.Lastly, show gratitude early and often. Everybody likes Thankyou notes :-)

Women In Cyber Security Conference (WiCyS)

Atlanta Georgia March 27-28, 2015


1. Workshop on Network Packet Analysis

We started with an introduction of the wireshark tool; a tool used for network packet analysis.

We then discussed when is it illegal to capture traffic?

For example, if you are at Starbucks, and it provides free wifi. You start capturing traffic, which contains people’s data then it is not considered bad because you are intruding someone’s privacy. 
The speaker mentioned the use of website [1] to see real time attacks source and target countries. 

We then learnt how to capture network traffic using wireshark and analyzed sample pcap files.

We first analyzed the pcap files containing traffic of DoS attacks. We saw the flooding using syn packets.

We then analyzed the Pandora pcap file which contained traffic of a user listening to music on Pandora's website. It was interesting to know that Wireshark is able to capture the actual user data is also sent along and that we can actually download it. We then downloaded the actual music listened by the user on pandora.

To find packets containing a certain type of file, we used Edit -> Find Packet->mp4 as a string.  

This showed us the packets containing music files. 

To save the music file we clicked on file ->export objects -> http->saveas-> song.mp4. Through the saved file we found out that the user was listening to Ariana Grande's song.

References:

1. http://map.ipviking.com

2. Capture The Flag Competition By Facebook

This was my first ever CTF. We formed teams of four. The teams competed with each other on a set of cyber security challenges.  Each challenge was shown over a particular country on the map and was worth a certain number of points. Our team---Cyber Angels scored 3100 :-)

References:
1. https://wicys.fbctf.com
2. http://overthewire.org

3. Talk: What I Know Now...That I Wish I Knew Then

This amazing talk was given by Tracy Camp, Colorado School of Mines. The speaker said she was utterly shocked that she became an ACM Fellow. How was that possible, when one considers all the mistakes she made in her career!

My takeaways from this talk are:
1. Find a group of mentors.
2. Focus on the four D's-Delete,Delegate,Delay
3. Learn to say no- Read this book
4. Read thecyberwire.com to remain updated about cyber security related news.
Here is a link to her talk at another venue - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNsDYXS3bkw&feature=youtu.be

4. Poster Competition

I participated in the poster competition and presented one of my Ph.D. dissertation projects titled "Gamified Permission Model for Facebook's Third Party Applications". I received a nice little tote as a participation prize.

SIGGRAPH 2015

SIGGRAPH 2015 was by far the best conference that I have been to so far. It was held from Aug 9-13 at Los Angeles Convention Center, California.

I do not belong to the computer graphics domain, but have always been fascinated by how the animated movies are made, emerging technologies, and virtual reality. This was my first SIGGRAPH, and I have been inspired and amazed by the number of things I learnt from this conference. Awesome ideas were presented at the conference and I really liked the idea of fast-forward talks in which the presenter has to describe their paper in 60 seconds. This is a great way of letting the audience decide which technical talks to attend and plan their time accordingly. Many presenters did a great job in describing their ideas in the form of a video.

I also served as a student volunteer, which gave me additional learning experience of interacting with people. I got introduced to a whole lot of extremely bright students some of whom became really good friends of mine by the end of the conference. 

During our student volunteer orientation, we were briefed about our duties and the dos and donts while onshift and got introduced to the team leaders and organizers. We were provided with cool red volunteer t shirts to wear while on-shift. At the end or the orientation, we had a fun little demo of the Wham City Lights Mobile app. This app uses the audience's phone to create a light show by sending them wham waves. See the video below showing a light show on the Queen's song bohemian rhapsody. 

 





 

Studio
There were numerous studio courses being conducted throughout the conference and were really interesting. These courses surrounded around using the tools such as Unity for game making, and Eclipse for mobile app development.
Video game making - I was assisting the contributor at this booth. People draw characters by hand using a piece of paper. These characters are then placed in the game environment box. This environment characters are then filmed in order to capture the characters from various angles. This film is then edited and used to create a game level in Unity.

Microwave  oven recipes for resins (MOR4R) - A technique to make acryclic PMMA 3D craft using microwave oven. The craft is first designed using a susceptor sheet by pasting it. This prevents the microwaves from being absorbed in these areas. The designed PMMA sheet is microwaved for 2 minutes to soften it. After that the sheet is bent into the desired shape as guided by the susceptor sheet lines. 

eBee - This project uses conductive hexagonal shaped fabrics to create games and help school kids learn basics of electricity. Each fabric piece has some positive and negative ends. The right edges of the fabrics need to be aligned to each other to complete the circuit. The picture below shows a green led lit by completing the circuit using these hand-made fabrics.

AgIC - Conductive silver ink used to create paper circuits. The picture below shows some tulips and a circuit that I created around them to light three green leds.

Emerging Technologies
Deformation Lamps: A project technique to make a static picture appear dynamic - This technique captures a static image using a regular RGB camera and performs image processing on its gray-scale version by morphing it in desired areas, and creating a deformation image sequence. This resultant deformation image sequence is subtracted from the unaltered gray-scale image to create a difference image sequence. This difference image sequence is then projected onto the static image through a regular projector creating an optical illusion and making the image appear dynamic. The below video shows a man appearing to be changing his expressions, and a ship appearing to be moving in water.

Virtual Reality Village/Dome
The virtual reality village was one of the best parts of the conference. They contributors demoed numerous exciting projects. I did not get a chance to explore everything.  However, the car crash experience inside an actual car, the dragon flight with actual wind blowing around you, and the 360 immersion experience inside the dome was amazing.

Art Gallery
The art gallery at SIGGRAPH displayed immensely creative pieces. Among these, I particularly liked the 3D printed arts and sculptures (these were hand painted and looked really real especially the bugs), computer aided manufactured knifes, and Interactive wall paper (touching the pieces would turn the lights on and off).
The 3D skull installation with 30 different visual designs, attracted a lot of attentions of passersby.

Computer Animation Festival
We were shown a list of really cool animated shorts and video games, most of which were yet to be officially released. We were also shown how the animations were performed in some of the most popular movies. In the beginning of the festival, we used the Wham City Lights app to create a light show once again (see the video below).

I did not get a chance to attend everything at the conference but I tried my best to benefit from it as much as I can. I definitely recommend you to attend this conference, and I hope to see you at Anaheim next year.

P.S: There is tons of free stuff at the conference :-)

YES+ Meditation Workshop at UNC Charlotte

5 day workshop

Day 1

Why are you here?
Gain inner peace, focus, meet new people, control thoughts, stay focused.
All of these narrow down to gaining happiness.

What is belongingness to you?
Closeness, possession...Whatever it is, if you have it you feel happy.

Write down one wish that you want to be fulfilled
Write down things that bother you
Write down what do you want to gain from this workshop

Activities to get to know others
Activity 1
Greet everyone else in the room-- say your name, shake hands with the person and say to each other "I belong to you". It was a little awkward.
Activity 2
Introduce yourself to your neighbor, and after your neighbor introduces themselves to you, you have to introduce them to everyone else based on the information they provided about themselves.
Activity 3
Play the game --Fire in the mountain run run run. Each person had to join a group after it was announced "groups of two/three/four etc"

Group division
After finishing activity 3, everyone sat down at a random spot. Four people sitting next to each other were assigned to one group for the rest of the workshop. Each group had to come up with a group name and a small dance. I being a fan of "Breaking Bad" suggested the name "Heisenberg". So, our group became Heisenberg :-)

Body Layers
Body, breath, mind, memory, self, ego

Just by being aware of the breath and breathing properly, we can be present in the moment and relieve stress.

Ujaye Breath or Victory Breath
We learnt and practised it, and shared our experiences.

Three stage pranayam breathing
Bhashtrika or bellows breath

Sixth annual women's lunch event at UNC Charlotte

Recently, I attended the sixth annual women's lunch event at UNC Charlotte. The event was sponsored by Siemens. I met a small group of female undergraduate and graduate students in computing and engineering. 

A few brilliant women at Siemens gave talks on their experience working at Siemen's, their path to success, and advice for female students in computing and engineering at UNC Charlotte. I enjoyed Jeannie Parsch's talk. She emphasized on the necessary skills for working in the industry. These skills are summarized in the slide below and the resume should cater for all these skills in order to secure a job.

Another important aspect that Jeannie discussed in her talk was how to effectively communicate with people and leave behind a legacy. She mentioned that if you are a good communicator, you can talk through a difficult situation even if you do not have a solution in mind. To do this, you need to 1) Practice positivity 2) Remain people oriented, and 3) Stay engaged. See the slide below.

Remote Desktop Connection

It gives me immense pleasure to share that today I learnt a new way of establishing remote desktop connection B-). I wish I had known about it sooner.
So, here are the steps to access a machine remotely:
1. Launch Google Chrome
2. Search for "Chrome remote desktop"
3. Intall the application
4. Enable remote desktop connection
5. Create an access code
The nice thing about this method is that it does not require a public IP address.

Now, to access this machine using another computer, follow the first three steps. Once you launch the application, you should be able to see a list of machines that can be accessed. Click on a machine you want to access, enter the access code, and VOILA :-).