Tuesday, August 19, 2008

GaCIT School and Sauna

Yesterday was the first day of the GaCIT Summer School on Gaze, Communication, and Interaction Technology. The first lecture was an excellent review of visual perception, going back to notable work by Helmholtz, Yarbus, and others, and leading up to modern neurophysiological work on cortical centers implicated in visual attention. It was good to see that portions of my notes were still fairly accurate although purposefully somewhat simplistic, and that there is still (considerable) room for future work. It was rather motivating, actually. I followed this presentation with a more perhaps practical approach to collecting eye movement data that I'll follow on today.

After the lectures we all took a bus to a Finnish sauna, situated at a nearby lake. The sauna is an experience complete with dinner, the hot smoke-fired sauna, followed by a dip in the lake. The sauna and lake provide a contrast of the extremes: hot (very hot) followed by cold (breathtakingly cold, and I mean that literally). Mind you, by the second round of sauna and lake dip, the latter was much more pleasant, not as shocking, and rather quite refreshing. All in all, very enjoyable.

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