Early in the day we went to CSafe to talk about the next steps of our assignment. We have already completed the binary parser and displayed the data in a pretty matrix. We talked about the program taking too long to print the entire data to a text file and was told that we no longer need to print (which was making the program take too long to complete) but to increment by 1 every time an NaN occurs in the data (number of missing values). Then calculate the percentage (total no. of NaNs/total value) It felt good to get the next steps that were broken down by our mentors.

Dr. Jing Dong was our luncheon speaker today. She is a transportation engineer at the Center for Transportation Research and Education. She works on cutting edge automation technology for transportation. She informed us that although we’re constantly told that fully automated cars will be on the road in a few years, she talks about all the reasons as to why this wouldn’t happen so soon as there are many surrounding factors that are not entirely considered when driving a fully automated vehicle as well as the prolonged legalities that come with new technology. She reminded us that technological progress is incremental, not a jump from cruise control to fully automated cars.