SCOPE Stories Week 3: Visiting Boston Scientific

Every SCOPE team visits its sponsor at least once and usually multiple times. Our first visit to Boston Scientific was yesterday. 

The visit was focused on getting us all the necessary background knowledge about how stents are designed, made, and tested. We spent a lot of time going from lab to lab talking to different people and learning about different machinery and procedures. My favorite area was definitely the stent-making lab, though the testing is more relevant to our project. We have a much better idea now of what parameters will be important in our model and what kind of testing we should do (or data we should ask for) when we need to verify our model, so it was a successful trip!

Also, our official/public project description is here!

SCOPE Stories Week 2: Stents and Goodbye to the Robo Lab

Today was SCOPE Kickoff, when all the teams had meetings with the liaisons from their sponsors! Most of those team meetings were in the afternoon from 4pm to 6pm, but our liaisons couldn't meet then, so we started our day with a two hour meeting. We have a much better idea of what our problem is now, and we get to visit Boston Scientific next week, which should help us define the problem even more.

We also now know which part of our project description can be public. We'll be working on mathematical modeling of gastrointestinal stents. Our sponsor brought us eight or so example stents that we get to keep until the end of the year, and we've already had a lot of fun seeing how they behave. We're jokingly referring to the tests we might end up running on them as the stent Olympics.

Also, remember how our space was weirdly placed in the Robo Lab? Well, a Babson MBA student was added to one of the teams, team A, in the room with four SCOPE spaces. He's not a US citizen or permanent resident, so he can't cross-sign the NDAs for Boeing or Raytheon, who are both in that room. (Sound familiar?) Originally, the plan was to switch team A with a different team, team B, all of whose members are US citizens. However, one person team B has a conflict of interest with one of the teams staying in the big room, so she can't cross-sign that team's NDA. My team, however, is all US citizens, has no conflicts of interest, and isn't dealing with information confidential enough that we need a room to ourselves. Thus, my team got to move again.

We think we're staying put this time.

Also, here's the promised answer to the question "What do the Harley-Davidson and BoSci teams have in common?" We have the same faculty advisor, Brian! We'll also be design review partners so that Brian only has to go to one set of design reviews.

SCOPE Stories Week 1: Wait, We're in the Robo Lab?

Seniors at Olin have two options for year-long capstones, Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship and SCOPE. ADE focuses on identifying opportunities and developing products/services to meet needs in underserved areas around the world. Most people, though, take SCOPE, in which each team of four to six students is sponsored by a company. SCOPE teams meet all day on Wednesday, and our first day was this week! 

I'm on the Boston Scientific (BoSci) team along with three other Olin seniors. We're a pretty diverse group in terms of major; we have a Mechanical Engineering major, an Engineering with Materials Science major, an Engineering with Physics major, and then me (mechE but very mathematical). We won't know until next week what we're allowed to say publicly about our project, but it's a good fit for all of us. It was my top choice of the projects, and I'm really excited for the rest of the year.

This week, our main task was to set up our work spaces. To our surprise, my team's space is in the Intelligent Vehicles lab, despite having nothing to do with robotics. In fact, we don't expect to use any of the tools or machines in the IV lab. We found out that Boeing was originally going to be in that spot, and their project is much more mechanical. However, the other team whose space is in the lab is Locus Robotics, and one of their team members is not a US citizen or permanent resident. Boeing's non-disclosure agreement this year requires that the signee be at least a permanent resident, and teams in the same space have to cross-sign each other's NDAs. To resolve this, the SCOPE organizers swapped Boeing and BoSci, and thus my team ended up in the Robo lab.

Question (to be answered next week): What do the Harley-Davidson team and the BoSci team have in common?

To an Oliner Considering RIPS

The last day of RIPS was a week ago. It ended up being a good program for me, but I remember how unsure I was when I first got the offer and how long I considered it before saying yes. I wasn't sure what it would be like to be an engineer at RIPS, if I would end up as the team project manager because of my experience on teams (or worse, end up PMing despite not being the official PM), and whether I would end up on a project that would be interesting to me. So now, looking back, here's what I would tell another Oliner considering RIPS.

Community

The past couple of  weeks have made me think about communities of which I've been a part. There are a lot of them, and often it's the people that end up being most important to me about a place or experience. Here are a few recent moments that have really highlighted community for me.

Things I'm Learning

RIPS Midterm Presentations were a week ago, and after our midterm presentation and report, our team and sponsor agreed that the specific problem we had been working on was probably not going to lead anywhere. We'd been searching for closed forms for several values/properties related to a family of polynomials, and what we had found so far indicated that getting clean analytic results was unlikely. So we've pivoted to some more numerical and physics-related directions for the last couple of weeks of the project.


I was thinking through all of this, and I concluded that most of what I've learned falls into three categories.

"Not much is known" is quite different from "Not much has been done."

We thought we were coming into a problem on which relatively few people had worked. One of our tasks for the first part of the project was to conduct a more thorough literature review and find out how much people had looked at this family of polynomials and what they had found. It turns out that a small group of people had done significant work, simply without much success. Either the problem is very difficult, or it's simply not possible. (My team leans heavily toward the latter, though saying it's impossible is questionable because of some vagueness in the problem statement.)

"The steady state of mathematical research is to be completely stuck."

(Quote from this NYT article about Terry Tao)

I knew this quite well coming into this summer. But if there is anything this project has reinforced, it is that much of the story of doing mathematics is a lot of work resulting in not much progress. (This goes with the above, really.) Earlier this week, I walked into Mariette's office to check on something with her, and she looked at me and said, "I found the brick wall again." That's math research for you: banging your head against a brick wall, hoping at some point it will fall...so that you can move onto the next, even more exciting brick wall.

Math.

Without this project, I don't think I would have considered learning about orthogonal polynomials. Other than using a couple of nice families of them in PDEs, I'd never really seen them, and even then I didn't have to know anything about those families, just that they existed and were solutions to particular equations. But now I know so much about the theory of orthogonal polynomials, and I probably know more about Maxwell polynomials than all but maybe a couple dozen people in the world. In addition, for our new directions, I've been working on a numerical analysis part of the project. (I'm the one person on the team who knew almost zero numerical analysis... so of course I volunteered to do that bit.) In just a few days I've learned a lot about numerical analysis in general and quadrature and root-finding in particular.

Approaching Hard Problems: Math and Engineering

My friend Amelie and I have been talking about our summers, and in particular the differences in our research came up. She's on an interdisciplinary engineering team working on blimps, and I'm doing math research that has many applications but isn't really applied in and of itself. 

It turns out that my team is working on a problem that is harder than we expected. We're looking for a number of different pieces, and we've found that having any one of them would allow us to find all of them without too much work. The problem is finding one, and we're a bit stuck. There are directions that we're exploring, and we've confirmed a lot of the work that we've found in literature, but at this point it doesn't feel like we're going to be able to make much progress, and we'll probably end up pivoting to a related but more approachable problem.

Amelie's reaction when I told her this was that math research seemed pretty scary, that in her kind of research, maybe there's one way she would prefer to do things, but really she could come up with six different ways. If something doesn't work, there are other ways to accomplish the same task. But when we're stuck, we don't necessarily have that option. We try to find ideas for new approaches or information from doing more literature review and from discussions with other people, but sometimes that doesn't lead to anything helpful.

We're looking for closed forms of certain expressions, and we're not even sure they exist. We know that if they do exist, they're far from elegant, but we don't really have ideas for proving the closed forms don't exist, either. So we're reading, trying to follow lots of trails, and talking to our liaison a lot for suggestions on directions to go right now and about possibilities if this is just too intractable.