Sarvesh at IEEE SMC 2017
The IEEE SMC 2017 conference was held in the beautiful destination of Banff, in Alberta – Canada from the 5th to the 8th of October 2017. I had the pleasure of presenting my work titled ‘A Human-Like Steering Model Sensitive to Uncertainty in the Environment’, at the conference and getting valuable feedback from a diverse and international audience. The conference had a good blend of papers from diverse topics ranging from studies on orange juice to cyber security. Following my interests I attended sessions focused on Human Factors and Shared control. It was a great opportunity to mingle with like-minded people and discuss my ideas with senior researchers.
As a part of the conference, there was a BMI Hackathon organised as well and my inner geek encouraged me to take part in it for fun. We were a rag-tag bunch of 4 students from 4 different countries met for the first time at the event) and put together a BMI which could control an ‘Orthosis’ hand. Our team was aptly named ‘Orthosis on Fire’ as we skilfully managed to fry the motor driver of our device, 2 hours before our final presentation.
Apart from the educational part, it was a great learning experience for me – about Canada. Not only did I have the chance to explore Banff (during the conference evenings – I did attend the conference :P) , but following that I took a 3 day train ‘The Canadian’ to explore the rest of Canada. Travelling from the Rockies, through the prairies, the lakes of Manitoba, and ending up at the busy city of Toronto was quite an experience. All in all, they were great 10 days, learning about Haptic Shared Control, making new friends, and learning about a new country!
