Thursday, March 30, 2006

2006 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Today I found out that I won the 2006 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Last year I won Honorable Mention, so the big question is "What did I do differently this time around?" The short answer is, "I wrote awesome essays that addressed the NSF Merit Review Criteria of Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts."

I felt like I was writing a somewhat non-technical introduction to my thesis when I was writing the proposed research essay. If I know you and you think that reading my essays (old ones got Honorable Mention and new ones got The Award) will be useful when you are applying for the NSF GRF this upcoming fall, then get in touch with me. NOTE: Only if I already know you or you go to the Robotics Institute at CMU will I help you out. In other words, if you are thinking of emailing me with the hope of getting my essays than don't even bother.

I'm still waiting to hear back from the NDSEG fellowship. On another note (slightly old news):
Alexei Efros(My research advisor) won an NSF Career Award and his other vision student, Derek Hoiem, won a Microsoft Fellowship.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:18 PM

    Tombone my sincerest congratulations representing the crew from good ole patchogue. Hopefully next year I'll have some luck with the NIH fellowships since now I have an idea of what I want to do (neurotrauma). Again buddy, Congratulations!!!!

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  2. Thanks! The hard work paid off! Thanks again for proof-reading some of those NSF essays.

    Send me some images that you are obtaining from your research, since I will be applying unsupervised learning techniques to medical images as a part of my PhD thesis and I want to see what kind of stuff you have to deal with.

    -Tomasz

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  3. Anonymous2:46 PM

    What type of format do you need. I can export them as gifs or jpegs. The way they are right now are .lsm files and u need a special viewer to view them as they are set up in databases as i imaged the tissues using a confocal scope which i set up to take 2 um thick image slices. Therefore for each database there are about 22 images (45 um brain sections on the slide). I want to get some positive controls for you. I think a great thing to do would be to make a pathology program which can differ live cells from dead cells using this new DNA stain called DAPI. The way the DAPI analyisis works is that a normal(live) cell will have a round morphologically correct nucleus. While a cell which went under apoptosis(programmed cell death) will have a condensed and fragmented nucleus, while a cell that went under necrosis (non-programmed death) will have spewed its nuclear contents into the surrounding environment. I will find good examples of each for you to help train your computer. My project as of now (very short one) is to make up a means to detect astrocyte degeneration after an induced traumatic brain injury, however a program which could analyze live dead cells in fixed tissue would be extremely financialy lucrative, not to mention also help train up your computer's intelligence. Let me know what foramt of picture you need and I'd be happy to send em over to you. Be good!

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  4. I think simple jpegs will be fine for now. I just want to get an idea of what kind of quality images you are working with. I don't want to use any special viewer. If you cannot export to any particular format, then just take a screenshot and send that over.

    If you have a few extra minutes, you can go into your favorite image editing program and outline some features of interest that you would like a program to automatically detect. (For example, just take a red paintbrush and draw a circle on top of the structure of interest). If you can just talk about the structures of interest without drawing any boxes or circles, then that's even better.

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  5. Well done! Keep up the good work.

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