My Project Diary 1: Concerns with my Masters Project
Long story short: I changed supervisors during my masters. Covid hit. What started as a project focused on human behavior had to change to accommodate the social distancing. A project focused on biology, neuroscience and the limits of our knowledge on the subject have now changed to a project more focused on engineering and building devices.
So what does it means to me as a biologist going through an engineering project? Well. I am used to camaleoning myself on what I need to get things done. But this was got me confused in core concepts: how should I move from being critical to my every thought on experiments to BUILDING something thoughtfully?
This was a culture shock coming from a biological background. I mean, we build stuff when necessary, but our focus is on the experimental design rather than on the equipment itself. So I confess I took a time — I needed a time — to process what this change would mean to me and what I could learn and do with it. Since I am also a Data Scientist, I used programming languages to make the equipment work — which is something I consider as “me engineering something”. But there are core concepts that I need to write in order to address.
Project Specifics:
Devices:
- commercial EEG (important, since “commercial” means it was not built to have much sensibility or specificity neither to be used in a scientific project — which does NOT mean that you shouldn’t use it in such, it depends on your project focus)
- Eye Gaze device (follows where you are looking at and when — considering the fabricator's specifications like frequency rate for updating eye gaze position)
Goal:
Correlations between eye gaze and EEG sign from the commercial device.
Challenges:
Being one electrode as it is, the chances are I am seeing a lot of noise. Sad, sad noise. It could come from me moving my head. It could come from the plugin on my wall (although its frequency is theoretically cleaned by the device — we’ll check for that). But I will not have another electrode capturing the same ‘wave’ of neurons being pushed above their threshold. Was it noise? was it love? was it an illusion?
I don’t know. I will not have much to confirm it and won't have many humans involved either. N you are wondering? ME. Yup. ME. This one human you will be seeing an entire project is based on. Of course, I do not like that — statistically speaking. But I like the idea of needing my own and only permission to place an electrode on my head.
All good. So now that I expressed my questions on the topic, let's move on to …
Setting things up
First things first, I do need to connect the dots. Meaning: I need to connect the devices. In order to do that, and to be able to organize myself, I also need to set my working environment up and running again. My working set should be composed of: my old windows notebook (still works like a charm), EyeGaze device and all its components, EEG device, AAA batteries, and AAA batteries charger.
Ok. So after that, I will need to:
- Set up TRELLO on what I need to get done
- How could this kind of data collection be useful in the future?
- Read, read, read!!!
By the time I finish writing this, my working space is already ready for work. As I do both: work as a Data Scientist and also am trying to finish my masters' project, I spared two spaces for the two activities.
Home office wonders. Hopefully making this public will help out someone going through similar things, or at least make me more productive by being ashamed of how long I am taking to make more for my project. In part two I should be talking about the online courses I have been taking to learn more about Neurosciences, Signal Processing, and Statistics.
