Something with cats.

My research proposal was rejected :(

My self-esteem increased. It was the first time I felt truly good at something.

In the last few days I've been collecting data for our lidar-based people detector, and it made me wonder if foot fetish is also extended to lidar scans 😂

Just ordered a new (well, not the newest) Alienware laptop. I know it doesn't really justify the price, but I'm such a fan-girl.....

My paper got accepted to a good journal, and I was asked to send my bio and a picture. The post-doc in charge said the picture was unsuitable in a very condescending manner, without explaining what is the problem.
I asked my (ex-)advisor what is wrong with it, and he said my clothes and the settings are fine, but my expression is "judgmental, angry and will make the readers uncomfortable".
Imagine it's 2021, and girls in academia still need to deal with that shit of "why aren't you smiling?"

When my poor spatial skills and extremely random associations meet.
Colleague: How big is the sensor?
Me: Well, it's...ugh..about this...hmmm, bigger than the other one, but like...I don't know, like a small bible?

I kind of feel like I invested 2.5 years of my life trying to run away from being a hamster, and here I am in my PhD back in the hamster spot.
The moment I finish compiling some not-os-compatible package, I get a new one to tame. A day after perfecting a sensor integration, another sensor is thrown at me. I am the one who calibrate and tunes the MoCap system, including manufacturing the markers and ordering part. I make sure the robot is functional, from software to battery replacement.
I need to crawl on floors to collect data, while the rest of the lab uses public datasets.
I optimize C++ code, and then get asked to write unit tests and use a CI, while the rest of the lab just writes some subpar Python.
They are doing research and I am doing Cinderella work.
I shouldn't be punished because I get shit done, whether it 3D modeling, CMake voodoo or low-level programming.
Instead of encouraging other lab mates to develop skills, everything is thrown at me. Fuck that shit.

I reached the bottom of the barrel baby-talking to a robot 😂
The localization demo worked out of the box, in a very disturbingly suspicious way.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

I've been getting hostile vibes for being Israeli from a German guy in the lab. Consistently, it's not the MENA people who take issue with it, but the "enlightened" left-wing westerns.
Haters gonna hate, but I finished porting my NMCL to c++ and it's x25 faster than the Python version. Hopefully, I can do a live demo on the robot next week :)

So I integrated the second Lidar, and did a small quantitative evaluation - the localization succeeded in 133 out of 135 scenarios.
The next step is to tentatively port all my python code to C++. So I started this today, and while I always hate on Python and say I like C++, porting all this code looks so damn painful....

Easy - an actress. My drama queen skills are out of this world, and I am a master emotional manipulator.
I was accepted to acting school but my mom put a veto on it, and said first I need to get a real profession and then I can make stupid choices.
But after my engineering degree and army service I was too old for sucking cock in LA.
So here I am doing my robotics PhD. Feel sorry for my lab mates having to take my melodramatic shit on the daily.

While working on my localization algorithm, I also set up a baseline I can compare my results to. I chose AMCL which is the go-to localization package everyone uses in ROS.
I took a peek at their code and found this atrocity - "ad hoc weighting scheme" where probabilities that are not mutually exclusive are added together, and also taken to the power of 3 because why the hell not!

First results from my work on the YouBot - Localization based on lidar and wheel encoders. My algo is still over-confident, and I need to improve it. But just getting all this shit to work together in ROS was so hard...
For now it's in Python, but when I am sure of its correctness I re-write it in C++ and ROS2-compatible

https://youtube.com/watch/...

We got a list of new candidates for PhD positions in the lab. There are a lot of people from the Middle East, and it made me wonder if there might be an issue with me being an Israeli.

So if there are engineers here from the Middle East, and Muslim countries in general, would you see an issue with working with an Israeli?

I guess schools in DE are very safe, because this kind of behavior is normally punched out of you around 4th grade.
Just close the fucking window and shut the fuck up instead of snitching in a chat where the boss can see. And why the fuck was that guy in the lab on Sunday?
BTW, there is no chance anyone could pull our 75+kg robots out of that window. Not to mention they are like 20 years old and their only worth is as scraps.

So I made an ancient robot work with ROS2, and revived the motion capture system so I can collect (and sync) Lidar scans, odometry and GT pose. But the worse is ahead of me...

I hit a milestone in my PhD journey today. I wrote my advisor an "I'm so done with this shit" e-mail for the first time!

I want to rant about FaceBook ads. If you go through my likes and pages I follow you'd be certain I'm a teenage boy - anime, robotics/CV labs, motocross clubs, sport car brands, skateparks, punk bands....
What ads do I get? Underwear that absorbs your period, cosmetics and wedding dresses. It's like they totally discard my personal preferences and show me ads that would appeal to the generic 30 year old female.
That's lame.
Fuck, I get ads for "all body type" clothes with plus size models. All that deep learning shit, and you can't see from my images I have a 60cm waist? At least show me the skinny girls brands....

Does anyone have experience with aligning 2D Lidar scanners?
I have a front and back facing ones, each with 270 degrees scanning range, so they have overlap.
Is there a golden standard for offline Lidar alignment, like Charuco board for camera alignment?

My modus operandi 😂
Taking my own decisions is so scary.
In the wise words of Tsunami Bomb, Independence doesn't start when you leave home!

So the battery of our YouBot died, and since it's deprecated we had to ask the EE department to manufacture one for us. When a member of my group asked them for the custom battery last year, it took them 5+ weeks to get it.
Today I went there, and threatened the engineer to cry daily outside his room until it's ready. He already ordered the parts and said I will have it assembled by Tuesday.
I am totally in love with the terrifying effect a crying female has over male engineers.

I just saw a LinkedIn post where some guy suggested to fix gender bias in Google Translate by a few lines of JS code replacing every "he" or "she" by "he/she". Damn, give that man a Turing award, he solved the problem of biased models!!!
I love that his solution is completely contextless and will allow men to finally have periods and give births. Also, that the idea of bias embedded in models in general is completely lost on him.

My ex-colleague from Sony wrote to me to consult about SLAM system for his side project. Bro...I'm reading papers for like 2 weeks and in no position to advise anyone 😂

Since I am vain as fuck but also lazy, I check my appearance in the webcam instead of walking to the bathroom and using the the mirror. As I am also technologically challenged, I'm still not sure how to open the webcam on Ubuntu, I wrote a 10 lines c++ program (OpenCV) to do it for me. Yeah...

So here I am going over the list of papers I need to read before I start working on my PhD project, and some of the papers are seriously MEH. I take a look at one of the video submissions, and of course to prove their fairly weak point, they rendered women jumping with their cleavage out and with skirts short enough to see their underwear.
I just started and I already feel like I want to puke all over these intellectuals, like that kid in the Korn video.

The hype of "we will have autonomous cars by 2025" reminds me the 2017 hype of "we will have autonomous cars by 2021". I guess if you try this PR trick enough times, eventually you will get it right.

During an annual review process, my friend, who is a female dev (doesn't work with clients), got feedback that she needs to smile more.
I'd like to hear from the male devs here, how many of you were asked to smile more?

I am preparing for my exam in a software engineering course, where we discuss best practices for programming, testing methodologies and project management.
One of the topics is CMMI, and basically it states that organizations with mature development processes can produce exceptional software even if the teams involved are average.
Do you really think an efficient process can make up for lack of brilliance/ingenuity among the devs?

Making subtle and insignificant changes in every section of the article draft is the academic equivalent for urine marking.