informatio

Its the day 4 of the faculty tour and everyone was looking forward to the visit to Grand Coulee. We started our journey from Spokane to Winthrop after a nice breakfast of french toast and scrambled eggs. First stop for the scholars of the coffee nation; the local  ’starbucks’. Provost Wise graciously sponsored the coffee for everyone! Within 10 minutes and a cup of joe, the busload of faculty were all smiles. It doesn’t take much to satisfy this bunch..

Had a conversation with Shaun Lopez along the way and we got talking about the middle east. Shaun’s work focuses on mid-east history. He explained how he often introduces the politics of the region using advertisements and media to ease the students into the (typically biased) political debates. I am amazed at how interesting this would make learning history in his classes! I should attend one of his classes and learn more. We then talked about my youtube culture database idea and we found some interesting perspectives! He suggested it would be of interest to if we could provide a set of videos of Arabs from the american perspective and such. He also suggested studying the Turkish videos and in particular, the advertising campaign of the cola turka company. Very interesting insight on how the Turkish media is being used to facilitate product adoption using a Hollywood identity.

 
The first tour stop of the day was the grandly impressive Grand Coulee Dam. The fourth largest dam in the world and largest in the United States, the dam generates hydroelectric power to satiate the growing needs of  Washington, Oregon and California. What was really neat about the tour was the top-down view of the power generation process. We first saw the generators, then the shaft spinning at 7200 rpm and then the view of the turbine. If you are an engineer in the state of Washington, this is a must see.

Lunch stop for a salad and a meeting with Colville Nation leaders and the next stop was at a lumber mill near Omak. When I first studied pattern recognition and developed classifiers for the USPS  for handwritten recognition accuracy was critical due to the high confusion of the letters. Here I witnessed another application where the confusion matrix might be equally critical. As precut logs came in, there was a machine that used 5 point-laser measurements to compute the diameter of the log using a single rotation on its axis. Then the saw trimmed the log outside-in to convert it into a thin contiguous sheet of wood. The sheet was then sorted on the appropriate size conveyor. The laser driven classifier in the first step decided which conveyor was put in  position for the sheet.

Towards the end of the day we visited a an organic orchard with cherries and made our way to the last overnight stop for the tour - the Sun Mountain Lodge in Methow Valley.