Meeting plenty of interesting people!

Now that I've been here for a few days, I now feel fairly settled in Champaign - I'm getting to know my way around and quite a few of the locals as well. There is quite an interesting mix of people in the town. I have found everyone to be very friendly, intelligent and generally interesting to talk to - not necessarily what you may expect from 'small town America' but I guess Champaign is fundamentally different because the university  more or less is the town.

The town will be quiet for approx
another week

As mentioned in my previous post, I spent Monday and Tuesday getting oriented into Champaign and NCSA. As my supervisor (Radha) has been away sick for the last couple of days, the 'wheels' on my project haven't started moving as yet. I am a little confused as to what I will be doing as it has been indicated that I may be working on a project based in India relating to a mobile health clinic for the underprivileged, but this should (hopefully) be sorted soon.

Until I get a clearer understanding of what I will be doing, I have taken some time to investigate some of the projects that are in progress at NCSA and meet some of the people here. I met Thom Dunning, the director of the NCSA yesterday, who was very friendly and welcoming. Today, I dropped in to see Alan Craig, the Associate Director of HCI at NCSA, who I knew from a Monash MeSsAGE Lab seminar he delivered remotely from NCSA on the topic of Augmented Reality. I was really excited to attend this seminar as I can see great potential in the technology and feel that it will play a significant part in our lives in the not-too-distant future (not to mention that it's also really cool!).

The view from the building

In addition to the projects he is involved with, Alan told me about some of the projects that others are working on at NCSA and promised to put me in touch with a few more people. Some interesting projects include the use of stimulus from the brain to control and design product packaging, and other projects relate to information retrieval from music.

In the seminar he delivered, Alan mentioned the CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) that he was working on. This project is now under the umbrella of the Beckman Institute and is housed in south Champaign. Unfortunately, the infrastructure has been modified since Alan was in charge of the program and his software no longer works. Nevertheless, he is going to try to twist the arm of the new people who are responsible for the CAVE to give me a demo of what they are working on.

On a completely separate note, I went salsa dancing last night and met heaps of interesting people. I had a really great time and didn't end up leaving until fairly late. The last bus to my place departs before 11pm and one of my newfound friends gave me a lift home. I met Francisco, who is doing a PhD in Biophysics (Drug Discovery for Infectious Diseases) and he invited me to participate in a reading group with a some people from the Global Health Group, part of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. The book we will be discussing is Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen. Should be interesting!

The Assembly Hall - where the
basketball game will be held tonight

I will also be going to my first basketball game tonight, held at the assembly hall (see photo). The game is between UIUC and Northwestern, and I'm told that it should be a good one. I'm looking forward to it! I also had a chat to a couple of people who run the UIUC Ice Skating center and will be doing some ice skating lessons for a bit of fun. As for this weekend, I'm deciding whether to visit Chicago before everything livens up around campus and will keep you posted with my endevours!