MATLAB – A Love Story

By Kerry Halupka

Hey there,

My name is Kerry Halupka, I’m a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering, and I’m the newest member of the Research Platforms team. Since joining the team I’ve been involved with teaching free MATLAB workshops to researchers, and tweaking the course materials.

I had a ball teaching the @MATLAB for Women workshop with @Isa_Kiko last week at @unimelb. Looking forward to more in the future! @ResPlat

I started my PhD at the University of Melbourne in March 2013 after completing a Mechatronic Engineering degree at The University of Adelaide. My current work focuses on the bionic eye that is being developed by Bionic Vision Australia. By recording activity in the brain while activating the retina with our retinal prosthesis, I’ve been developing a computation model built in MATLAB to predict the brain’s responses to stimulation. My aim is to use the model to optimise the way that we electrically activate the retina, hopefully increasing the resolution of the images our patients can currently see.

I’ve been using MATLAB since the first year of my bachelor’s degree. Way back when I thought that university couldn’t possibly be any more difficult than year 12 in high school. I realised how very wrong I was at about the same time I discovered that a steady diet of vending-machine items and the occasional all-nighter does not a healthy person make.

MATLAB was introduced briefly as a side aspect to one of my courses. At the time I was taking another course in which the programming language C was the main focus, and I distinctly remember wondering why anyone would bother with the intricacies of C (pointers were the bane of my existence at the time) when they could instead languish in the supporting arms of MATLAB.

Since that first course MATLAB and I have had a lot of time to bond. I’ve spent many a late night bathed in the light of my computer screen as I type “just one more line”.  MATLAB has continued to enchant me with it’s beautiful development environment; the helpful, yet not pushy error messages (even going so far as to quietly hint at errors before I even execute my code); and the huge and incredibly helpful community of people around the world sharing their own functions (I often say that for anything you want to do in MATLAB, there is very likely someone who has already done it and shared their code, or there is a blog/discussion thread surrounding the issue). I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stumbled upon a new, exciting function and just think “I can’t wait till I have a chance to use that!” (this is my current obsession). 

Through the years MATLAB and I have had a complicated relationship. I spiced things up by introducing MATLAB’s graphical programming environment Simulink as a third party during my honours year. Together we made some lasting memories – I used Simulink to build a biomimetic detection and pursuit algorithm modelled on specific neurons in the visual pathways of certain insects, and tested the model in a virtual arena.

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(a) Virtual target pursuit arena built in Simulink (b) Camera viewpoint 1 (Cam. 1) records the chase from above. © Image information from the pursuer viewpoint (Cam. 2) undergoes analysis through algorithm in Simulink.

I had a brief fling with Python during the first year of my PhD while undertaking a computational neuroscience course in Okinawa, Japan. Suffice it to say that strained our relationship. However, I maintain that it was nothing but a meaningless holiday romance. Between you and me though, I’m still a little bit intrigued by Python, there is beauty in imperfection after all,  I sometimes consider taking one of the Python courses taught by Research Platforms.

In my other life (you know, the one that doesn’t involve a thesis) I enjoy martial arts, cooking, eating and music. Sometimes my love of eating and MATLAB even cross over!

 I’ve always loved learning new things - I’m half way through about 3 different courses on Codecademy right now, and I’m also learning German from another of the Research Community Coordinators, Isabell. So I’m a big proponent for learning. Since becoming a Research Community Coordinator I’ve realised that teaching is just as enjoyable and rewarding, if not more so. The two sides of this educational coin are also complimentary - every time I’ve taught MATLAB so far I’ve learnt something new myself.  So if you think you might want to learn along with me, come to one of our MATLAB courses, or email me at kerry.halupka@gmail.com  or tweet at me (@EngKerry) for more information (I promise I won’t wax lyrical at you about my love for MATLAB).