Princeton's First Cistern

Now that the Princeton students are here in Malta, the four of us finally have our chance to actually work with the ROV at a cistern. We went to Mdina today to visit a couple of cisterns at private residences there. Despite some confusion about where exactly we were supposed to go, we manged to get access to a pretty interesting cistern. We also got to explore the fortress at Mdina for a while which was pretty fun since none of us had been to anything like it before.

For this deployment, Drew ran the data collection, I piloted, and Anna and Yingxue managed the ROV. After lowering the ROV down the shaft, we found a rather interesting cistern that consisted of a main bell-shaped room with three circular chambers off to the sides. All of them were at slightly different depths but all were about one meter deep. We took 14 scans in all, and Billy says he should be able to make a pretty nice map out of the data we got.

The owner of the house we were working in was very excited to watch us work and see the images of his cistern. He was particularly interested to see just how much water it could hold.

Computer Science and Information Technology in Malta

On one of the sites we were mapping, we had the pleasure of meeting the head of the Engineering Department from the University of Malta and two students in order to let them view our data collection process. Erik and I got to interview them about our cultural research projects for our ethnic studies class.

My cultural research project is on the role of Computer Science and Information Technology in Malta. The idea of my project came from the startling fact that Malta has very few natural resources. One of the papers I was reading reported that there are "four extractive industries on which manufacturing might be built-- mining,forestry, fishing, and agriculture"[1]. It concluded that Malta has an insufficient environment for any of these industries[1]. Having few local resources for manufacturing severely limits what Malta's economy can do.

This challenged me to think of possible major industries for Malta. I came up with the idea that if the country couldn't base it's economy on making physical products then why can't it make information based products?

Upon talking to the students and the department head, I was informed that unlike Cal Poly, Computer Science is not part of Engineering but is part of their relatively new department of Information and Communication Technology. This didn't affect the quality of the information that they gave me.

They told me that there is heavy investment in Computer Science and Information Technology. In the latest Business Research and Innovation report from the National Statistics Office of Malta, they reported that 29.47% of all intramural research and development expenditures in 2004 were in computer and related activities[2].

Also, Maltese government research and development expenditures have increased from €4.1 million to €15.7 million in 2010[3]. Research and development specifically in Engineering and Technology has doubled since 2008 making it the most funded major field of science in Malta. This can be seen in the graph below.

The idea of heavy investment in Computer Science and Information Technology wasn't only reaffirmed by them but was also mentioned by Timmy Gambin who has been helping coordinate our research in Malta. He informed me that the University is constructing a building dedicated to Information and Communication Technology. Upon further research I found that the University was awarded a sum of €17.3 million for the project from the European Regional Development Fund[4]. It was said to be built because of the high demand for Information and Communication Technology graduates[4].

This is some of the information I have come across and I will be reporting on more very soon.

Works Cited

1. Young, B. S. "SocietyThe Maltese Islands: Economic Problems and Prospects for Industrial Development." Geographical Review 53.2 (1963): 263-86. Print.

2. Malta. National Statistics Office. Business Research and Innovation 2004-2006. 2008. Print.

3. Malta. National Statistics Office. Expenditure on Research and Development in the General Government Sector: 2008-2010. 2011. Print.

4. "New ICT Facilities Building at University of Malta." Gozo News. 17 May 2009. Web. 17 Mar. 2012 .

Sonar Bugs Fixed!

We have been having problems during our first scans with intermittent sonar performance. The sonar would frequently hang or pause, often corrupting our captures or disrupting a scan. After we returned from today's sites, Brent, Erik, and I layed out all of our cables and parts in an attempt to isolate the problem. We very quickly singled in on a software mis-configuration; the SeaSprite sonar scan software was expecting data on a different COM port than the hard-wired COM1 on the back of the laptop. We suspect that the optical RS485 converter was still getting the communication close enough, but would occasionally drop packets, causing the intermittent sonar.

Regardless of the cause, after setting the configuration to COM1 we were able to successfully capture reliable sonar data. We tested the configuration with all of our spare parts as well, to confirm that we had no broken or mis-configured components. Once everything had been confirmed working, we packed up the robot and control cases with a full set of parts, then packed up all the extras in the second control box. Tomorrow should bring us data much easier and much more quickly; this fix is a huge sigh of relief to all of us!

Scanning in Sicily

Today we had the opportunity to perform our first scans in the coastal town of Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily). The local archaeologists led us to an old building in the nearby countryside where a small rock column opened up into the cistern down below. The building was once a basilica from the 17th century, and was fascinating in itself. We successfully deployed the ROV and gathered a solid set of data from the site. Once we finished collection, we took a short walk up the street to a second, smaller cistern outside of another old building. Once back at home, we settled down in the hotel lobby and spent a few hours working on our visualizations. Everything is coming along nicely; today was an excellent field day!

Back at home, I made some more progress on my projective texture system. I am now able to load Jeff's maps in and project a single texture using shaders. My next goal is to add shader support for multitexturing and blending. The picture here shows a map from our hotel room projected into the main room of Jeff's keyhole cistern.