The Coppit Family Daily News

Here’s a super-cute video of Christopher. I took it in the hotel room during my recent trip to Delaware. Christopher is in a playpen for the night, but he’s obviously not ready to go to sleep just yet.

Saturday Daniel, Carmen and Maryanne came to celebrate Dan’s birthday. We all went to Christiana Campbell’s for dinner. They think we were put in the same room that they were in two decades ago when Daniel was visiting schools.

Christopher was good a dinner as usual. We just had to limit what he could reach. It’s good that he can eat bread now. We gave him some of our “drop” rolls, and they also brought him some applesauce, which was nice.

Afterward we walked up to the capitol building, but we came back because it was starting to get cold.

On Tuesday and Thursday we all went to Delaware. I was invited to give a talk to the “High Performance Computing” group about my research. Their name is a misnomer… It’s really the “Systems” group. I brought Dorothy along since I needed to work on my talk on the way up, and since I didn’t want to leave her stranded at the house without a car. (I could have ridden my motorcycle, but that would mean 5 hours with a suitcase riding behind me.)

The day of my talk Dorothy took Christopher (and the camera) to Longwood, a big indoor garden. So most of the pictures are of flowers:

You’ll need to log in to see pictures of Christopher.

Meanwhile, I met with David Shepherd, one of Lori Pollock’s students, in the morning, had lunch with her and her students, gave my talk, and met with more of Lori’s students in the afternoon. Their research is interesting, but I’m not sure there’s overlap right now.
I learned that their building was an example of “riot architecture” meant to confuse rioting students. Apparently the architects didn’t spend much time on other considerations-the offices were packed into narrow halls.

In the morning my host Martin Swany picked me up a little early so I could listen to a talk by one of their faculty candidates. It was nice to listen to a job talk that was software-oriented… W&M CS hasn’t interviewed a software engineering candidate since I started there.

We went to Norfolk today to visit Jeremy and his daughter Willow. Unfortunately Willow’s mom Heather could not be there, although her Heather’s sister Dawn was there.
Jeremy has been helping us out with some research on the technical differences between the Cochlear, Advaned Bionics, and Med-El devices. I like his approach… In talking with the company, he tells them that the smiling baby on the website tells him nothing, and that he wanted technical details.

One important thing that came out of this was that AB’s upcoming 120 device would emulate 120 channels over their existing 16 channels. I think they do some sort of electronic dithering to get this to work. I’ve heard rumors from the trials that the new device does work better than the old, so that’s encouraging news. Their sampling rates are also significantly higher than their competitors… 5k/sec sound sampling, with 90k/sec processing samples. Jeremy says that this rivals high-end audio equipment that he works with.

After lunch we took Willow and Christopher to the park. This is the first time Christopher has been on a slide, or playing in sand. The pictures below show how much he hated it. (Password protected due to pictures of kids.)

I spent my spring break climbing Mount Eclipse. Eclipse is a programming environment, and has a nice plugin architecture that allows people like me to extend it to do new things. We’re using it to implement our prototype software plans tool. I’m currently doing a reimplementation of my students previous prototype, cleaning up some of their suboptimal design decisions.

The problem is that Eclipse has a pretty steep learning curve. My students implemented the functionality we needed using some “hacks” that are hurting us now. So I’m trying to figure out the right way to do things. It took me several days to get productive, but it looks like things are moving along now.