Posted below is the project plan, which gives an explanation of the challenge given to us and maps out the path we are taking to accomplish the task.
Sunday 18 October 2015
Thursday 15 October 2015
Week 40
In the beginning of week 40 we arranged a meeting with Abdulmelik Mohammed from the DNA simulation team to get a better view of the project. The meeting were to take place on Friday the 2nd of October.
In the meantime we got directions to get acquainted with the previous work by reading the article that was published on rigid-body DNA simulations by the Natural Computations team. In addition, we installed Autodesk Maya and a plugin for it called vHelix. These would be used throughout our work so it was important to start getting familiar with the environment.
We also had a group meeting on Friday, before meeting with the contact person from the team. In this meeting we set up the rest of the communications platforms that were to be used between the group. For instant-messaging purposes we chose to use Telegram, as it is easily accessed on smart phones, as well as computers and tablets. For work-related communications, Slack was chosen to be the main communication application and Trello as a "virtual post-it board" to e.g. help keep track of things that need to be done and their priority order.
For easy and well-organized file sharing we chose to use Google Drive, as it is also available on many platforms and it is simple to keep all the shared data organized through Drive. As for the blog, Blogspot (or Blogger) was chosen as it seemed to be a suitable choice with a straightforward interface and ease of use.
After the group meeting we met with Mr. Mohammed at the Aalto Computer Science building. We learned a bit more about DNA and the previous work, as well as about the way the soft-body simulation will be working. We talked about limiting the subject and our goal to only concern the simulation of the DNA double helices as soft bodies instead of rigid rods, as the schedule may be too tight for also concerning the probability of some double helices missing and so forth.
We concluded the meeting by deciding to next get better acquainted with vHelix and to try compiling the scaffold-routing code by ourselves using Visual Studio. A next meeting was set to take place on Friday the 9th of October in the project workshop room.
Working hours up to this point.
In the meantime we got directions to get acquainted with the previous work by reading the article that was published on rigid-body DNA simulations by the Natural Computations team. In addition, we installed Autodesk Maya and a plugin for it called vHelix. These would be used throughout our work so it was important to start getting familiar with the environment.
We also had a group meeting on Friday, before meeting with the contact person from the team. In this meeting we set up the rest of the communications platforms that were to be used between the group. For instant-messaging purposes we chose to use Telegram, as it is easily accessed on smart phones, as well as computers and tablets. For work-related communications, Slack was chosen to be the main communication application and Trello as a "virtual post-it board" to e.g. help keep track of things that need to be done and their priority order.
For easy and well-organized file sharing we chose to use Google Drive, as it is also available on many platforms and it is simple to keep all the shared data organized through Drive. As for the blog, Blogspot (or Blogger) was chosen as it seemed to be a suitable choice with a straightforward interface and ease of use.
After the group meeting we met with Mr. Mohammed at the Aalto Computer Science building. We learned a bit more about DNA and the previous work, as well as about the way the soft-body simulation will be working. We talked about limiting the subject and our goal to only concern the simulation of the DNA double helices as soft bodies instead of rigid rods, as the schedule may be too tight for also concerning the probability of some double helices missing and so forth.
We concluded the meeting by deciding to next get better acquainted with vHelix and to try compiling the scaffold-routing code by ourselves using Visual Studio. A next meeting was set to take place on Friday the 9th of October in the project workshop room.
Sunday 11 October 2015
Week 39
We had our kick-off meeting on Friday the 25th of September, where we introduced ourselves to each other and started getting acquainted with the project subject: Soft-body dynamics simulation of DNA. Our team consists of six members, of whom two are systems analysists, two physicists and one information networks engineer, everyone with a programming background.
After the introductions we had some team-building exercises that helped us figure out the direction we are heading and find out about some of our strengths and weaknesses. In one of the exercises we reflected on our preferences of our own roles in a team using FourSight evaluation. We evaluated how much each of us were oriented towards the following roles: Clarifier, ideator, developer and implementer.
As a result of self-evaluation, we found out that while our team is strong on clarification, implementation and development, we are not as strong on ideating. The result indicates that our team consists more of realists than visionaries. This could however be further improved by first noticing the shortage of ideators in our team and then focusing on trying to think outside the box, looking for more creative ways of thinking and venturing beyond our comfort zone during the ideating process.
Next we constructed a trend analysis around our subject to map out the possible fields of applications for the finished product. We chose to use the wave model of the trend chart, as this seemed to be a clearer way of presentation. Some of the current trends we thought of included medicine and drug industry, fitness and supplement industry, 3D printing and nanomaterials. All of these could benefit from an accurate simulation of structures composed of DNA meshes.
After the exercises and the official part of the workshop lecture we agreed on forming some preliminary ways of communication and to sort them out better in the next meeting when we would have all of the members present.
After the introductions we had some team-building exercises that helped us figure out the direction we are heading and find out about some of our strengths and weaknesses. In one of the exercises we reflected on our preferences of our own roles in a team using FourSight evaluation. We evaluated how much each of us were oriented towards the following roles: Clarifier, ideator, developer and implementer.
As a result of self-evaluation, we found out that while our team is strong on clarification, implementation and development, we are not as strong on ideating. The result indicates that our team consists more of realists than visionaries. This could however be further improved by first noticing the shortage of ideators in our team and then focusing on trying to think outside the box, looking for more creative ways of thinking and venturing beyond our comfort zone during the ideating process.
Next we constructed a trend analysis around our subject to map out the possible fields of applications for the finished product. We chose to use the wave model of the trend chart, as this seemed to be a clearer way of presentation. Some of the current trends we thought of included medicine and drug industry, fitness and supplement industry, 3D printing and nanomaterials. All of these could benefit from an accurate simulation of structures composed of DNA meshes.
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| "Wave-model" trend analysis from the workshop session. |
After the exercises and the official part of the workshop lecture we agreed on forming some preliminary ways of communication and to sort them out better in the next meeting when we would have all of the members present.
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