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Honors Research from Dante and Colbert to medical applications of 3D images of food on a plate: Meet Cali Kopczick and Pavel Kulik

Jun 11, 2014

Departmental Honors Programs, in which students engage in advanced research within their majors, vary widely across campus and add on average between five and fifteen credits of work beyond the major requirements; some programs consist entirely of advanced course work, others require an Honors thesis alone, and some include both. We asked seniors Cali Kopczick (English) and Pavel Kulik (electrical engineering) to describe their Honors projects and provide some insight into the process and benefits of their research.

Cali Kopczick, Department of English

Cali Kopczick, '15
Cali Kopczick, '15

For my thesis on “Translation as History-Writing,” I employ Walter Benjamin’s theory about history and translation to examine how Mary Jo Bang’s 2011 translation of Dante’s Inferno and Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, destabilize linear history when viewed together and implicate their readers in uncomfortable connections between the horrors of the past and their own time.

Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno drew my attention because of my interest in how rhyme affected translation—Dante’s terza rima is notoriously difficult to pull off in English, and Mary Jo Bang gravitated instead towards assonance, alliteration, and a looser rhyme. However, as I read I became fascinated by the many anachronisms she slipped into her translation: lines from Bob Dylan songs, words from the Colbert Report, and demons in the form of Nazis. As I explored the politics of these anachronisms, my professor, Chandan Reddy, suggested I read Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” and by the time I had written most of my paper, a co-worker at the Odegaard Writing and Research Center pointed out that I was echoing many of Benjamin’s points from another essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Reading the two essays side-by-side, I detected a number of commonalities. In particular, Benjamin seems to view both translation and history-writing as a matter of bringing together apparently disparate fragments to gain a new, more total understanding. I found the theoretical framework hard to shake loose. So when I turned to Benito Cereno, which is based on an autobiographical account by American sea-captain Amasa Delano, I was excited to see how a cross-genre novella can provide critical insight into the art of translation. I ended up writing about it for my term paper, and this quarter I am expanding it into my Honors thesis.

Departmental Honors has given me a new, more independent mode of engaging research in English. There are no tests, no specific content that you need to assimilate to please the professor; the process is guided by your own curiosity, which turns out to be a really amazing stepping stone into graduate school or into the real world, where you’re the one chasing down what you want to study. At the same time, studying English alongside a cohort of other curious, highly-driven English majors provides external motivation. Not only do you have to bring your A game to those kinds of class discussions, but you also find yourself getting this sort of contagious excitement. Everyone is weirdly, obsessively interested in literature, and it’s hard not to become invigorated by that. My goodness it’s been an intense year!

Pavel Kulik, Department of Electrical Engineering

Pavel Kulik, '14
Pavel Kulik, '14

My Honors research topic, the development of a Dietary Data Recorder System (DDRS), was inspired by a need to track patients’ daily caloric intake for research studies at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The DDRS is a smartphone application that estimates the volume of food on a plate by using 3D reconstruction from a video taken by the user. The app includes a small calibrated laser attachment which projects a light pattern onto the food, similar to a barcode scanner. The manner in which the light changes its pattern on the food provides information about the shape of the food in each frame of the video. While simultaneously gathering accelerometer data from the smartphone itself, the app is able to arrange the images from a video in three dimensions to reconstruct the food and estimate its volume. If the user includes what food is on the plate, the volume can then be converted into calories consumed.

Interest in this project started with the Honors seminar “Transformational Technologies in Medicine” taught by Professor John Gennari, where I learned about the positive impact personalized health records had on patients who played an active role in their health care. As a result, I became interested in developing tools that could help patients provide physicians with additional information about their health. At the time of the seminar, the DDRS project was being pursued by a Ph.D. student, Junqing Shang, in the electrical engineering department who was seeking undergraduates to help with software algorithm development. I started off as a member of the image processing team tasked to automatically detect the light pattern on the food in each frame of the video. By the end of the quarter my team and I had successfully developed an efficient detection algorithm that we finished sooner than anticipated. Shortly after, Junqing accepted a full-time position and I asked my professor if I could take over leadership of the project as my Honors research, to which he agreed. For the next year I led a team of undergraduates in completing the software behind the application and worked with researchers at Fred Hutch to optimize the system for use with the patients in their studies.

Being a part of Honors has not only challenged me to excel in my coursework but also to apply actively what I learn in the classroom to current problems in the community. As an electrical engineering pre-med student, I worried I had chosen a major that was far too removed from my interests in medicine. The Honors seminar inspired me to bring my engineering toolbox to the medical field. Being able to apply the knowledge I gained through Honors research has been an invaluable experience that has strengthened my passion for both technology and medicine, and convinced me I have chosen the right path in my education. I gained teamwork, leadership and professional skills that I would have never been able to develop in the classroom alone. My experience through Honors research ultimately led to a paid position in the bioengineering department developing software for a low-cost medical diagnostics platform. But more than that, it has prepared me well for an exciting career in the medical field.