July 8

Day three!  Following our daily morning meeting, I began to work with the software, which I downloaded yesterday, called ENVI.  Basically, it allows one to process images and extrapolate different bands in order to analyze and examine the images more clearly and carefully.  At 10 am, I attended the weekly Remote Sensing Lab meeting.  For an hour or so, the entire faculty and staff of the Remote Sensing department get together and one of the faculty makes a presentation on work which they are doing in this area.  Today, Dr. Vodacek, who is also my advisor, presented his work in tracking moving vehicles; his work combines both real images and the anticipated kinematics of a vehicle in order to track where the vehicle drives. While the presentation was very upper level and I am not familiar with all of the terminology and technology used, I felt that I was able to grasp the basic concept and I found the ideas and concepts presented to be really cool and innovative.  It was also really neat to see and listen in on research that is ongoing and to hear colleagues discuss ideas.

 Following the meeting, I continued to work to access satellite images and started to familiarize myself with ENVI.  Then, at noon, some of the interns, myself included, met with undergraduate students who are working here over the summer in order to listen in on a presentation about historical document imagining.  Dr. Easton, who works in the historical document imaging lab, explained how he used different waves of light in order to uncover texts that would otherwise be unseen to the human eye, which was really cool.  Afterwards, I went back to working on ENVI and finished the day by accessing the specific location which I will be looking at and analyzing for the next six weeks; this location is the Akagera National Park located in Rwanda.