(photo taken by Dag Peak)
Last week I was at Denver for Fulbright's Enrichment Seminar. It was an incredable experience to meet with 140 fulbrighters from almost 70 countries. The enrichment seminars are a tradition and bring together approximately 140 first-year foreign Fulbright students and ten recently returned Fulbright U.S. alumni in nine cities across the United States. The goal of these seminars is to provide the participants with a valuable personal and professional opportunity to meet and network with other Fulbrighters from around the world who are studying in the United States as well as with American citizens in each seminar city. Students develop a greater understanding of U.S. contemporary life and culture, policy formulation and public attitudes concerning issues of national and international importance.
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Scientific Visualization (by Prof. Xavier Tricoche) was the most exciting course I took this semester. I worked on several visualization project with VTK (an open-source toolkit for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization). All visualizations below are implemented in Python and includes several methods combined together (isosurfacing, color visualization, direct volume rendering,transfer function design, vector visualization and so on).
Halloween is absolutely my favorite holiday :) The first time I celebrated halloween was back in 2008, San Jose (I haven't got the enough time to find a costume, though). This time, I had everything ready to turn into a vampire, even fangs :) Here it is! (left: Ilke, right:me)
I think you'll see me as Hit-girl (Kick-Ass) or Daft Punk next year :)
This year, I had the change to participate and speak at GHC 2010 (held in Atlanta, GA from 28th of Sep-2nd of Oct). Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is the largest Women In Technology conference in the world:2,147 attendees, 960 students, 280 schools, and 29 countries represented in the conference.
As only about 26% of the presentations submitted were selected, I was delighted to speak at Getting Started in Free and Open Source panel (a part of Open Source track). I'd like to thank to Leslie Hawthorn for organizing this wonderful panel and to my colleagues Selena Deckelmann, Greg Hislop, Deborah Nicholson, Terri Oda who spoke at the panel.
(Photo taken by Terri Oda)
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It's been a few weeks since I came to Purdue and everything is going great! I've taken Data Mining, Scientific Visualization and Computer Vision classes so far. It'll take some time to settle down to Lafayette and US in general but I really enjoy the campus right now :)
Btw, I really like this P figure; everywhere around Purdue!
I had a wonderful time this week. We went to Los Angeles trip with my friends from Fulbright. It was the first time I visited Disneyland and I ignored the fact that I am a 24 year-old but I enjoyed Space Mountain instead! :) You can see me wearing Minnie Mouse hat in the photo above ;)
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I am currently at San Diego State University for Fulbright's orientation program. I am with other 35 Fulbrighters from all around the world; Columbia, Gana, Paraguay, Chile, Mozambique, Brazil, Tanzania, Germany, Mongolia, Morocco, Dubai, ... internatinality rocks! :)
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Last week I was at Google Zurich office for Anita Borg Retreat. We were about 100 scholars and finalists at Google Zurich and enjoyed talks, workshops and networking. A photo from the retreat:
Keynote speechs from Stephanie Hannon (Google Wave's product manager) and Corinna Cortes (Head of Research at Google New York) were incredible. Especially I really liked the story of Corinna Cortes on Support Vector Machines.
There were lots of workshops and talks from many Googlers from all around the world: "Google Product Design Workshop" from Fiona Herring (Product Manager, Google Zürich), "User Experience: Research and Design" from Jennifer Gove (User Experience Research Manager, Google Mountain View), "Natural Language Processing: Semantic similarities from billions of examples" from Keith Hall (Senior Research Scientist, Google Zürich), "User Experience: Search UI Experiments" from Robin Jeffries (User Experience Lead, Google Mountain View), "Infrastructure: Information Storage at Google" from Kate Ward (Google Dublin) were some of the talks I can remember.
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I am happy to announce that I finally made my decision and I am going to Purdue University for my Ph.D. studies!
Purdue is ranked in top 12th in Computer Engineering and top 19th in Computer Science in United States. Purdue University, founded in 1869, has the second largest international student population of any public university in the United States. As a astronomy-lover, I am very happy to learn that Purdue is very famous with its aviation technology and aeronautical engineering programs and it is the highest rated and most competitive in the world. Over one third of all of NASA's manned space missions have had at least one Purdue graduate as a crew member. Neil Armstrong (the first person to walk on the moon) and Eugene Cernan (the last person to walk on the moon) are Purdue alumni :)
I am going to fly to San Diego before arriving Purdue and I'll visit San Diego State University for a month for Fulbright orientation program. I'm very excited about meeting other Fulbrighters from all around the world!
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