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KYLA MCMULLEN: I was inspired to choose this field of study by
a number of things. It kind of just came together. So for
instance, when I was younger, I used to always want toys that
had like, some sort of computer or technological component in
it. For example, like, I used to like the little like, My
Secret Dear Diary things. Like, probably like, a pocket
organizer or something. Probably two steps above a
calculator, but I liked that. I liked like, little virtual pets,
lots of computerized sorts of things and I always thought of
computers as like, almost like magic. I didn't understand how
they worked, so I had to figure out how in the world do these
things work. So when I was in high school, my college – sorry,
my high school had a computer science track where you could
study like, computer math or computer science. So I decided
to do that and then it was time to pick a major for college. It
was pretty much a no-brainer. I pretty much thought about all my
classes and said, "OK, which of these classes-" I was a typical
high schooler. Like, "Which class do I hate the least?" So
I remember thinking, "Well computer science, I really liked
that class. I think it's really fun." So – but then looking
back, I don't know why it was such a huge stretch because I
always thought of myself as someone who loved computers.
Like, my best friend's mom used to call me "Inspector Gadget"
when I was little because I loved like, little gadgets and
things that – I don't know. It was – I don't know why it was
such a hard decision.
The best piece of advice I've ever received is, "Don't compare
yourself to other people." So I received that piece of advice
when I was in graduate school and it's so true because we take
so many different paths in life, and you may see people who you
started school with who are doing things that are different
from what you're doing. It doesn't make what you're doing
any worse or any more wrong or correct. So not to compare
myself to other people's trajectories, their
accomplishments, things like that because then if you're not
living up to what you think the ideal person should be, then you
start to feel a bit sad about your own personal circumstance
when you could in fact, be doing fine and you're just comparing
yourself for no reason.
So as a child, I didn't have a lot of scientific experiments,
but I had a – I used to take things apart a lot. So my dad
used to work for a furniture company and they had these pens,
and the pens had about eight different parts to it, and they
were all different colors. So I would come in and he'd bring
home like, let's say, ten pens, and I would take them apart and
put different parts together. Like, let's say I would make the
top red and the bottom blue and put the springs in different
places and just figure out how a ballpoint pen worked. I've
probably taken apart a ballpoint pen at least ten or twenty
times, but that was pretty much what I used to like to do. Do
you remember like, the Erector Sets that used to – I wanted an
Erector Set so bad. My neighbor had one, so I used to play with
his, but like, I used to like, little things where you could
just tinker and take things apart and put them together
and make new things.
My favorite thing about being a computer scientist is the fact
that I can make anything and it's almost as though like –
it's almost like an art form to me because if I wanted to make –
for example – I don't know if I should tell this story or not,
but like, I'm really bad with keeping in touch with people and
so I wanted to make like, an email agent where I could send
personalized emails but to a bunch of people. So I made this
thing in that lab where it would – all I had to do was fill like,
maybe a sentence specific to that person and then like, fill
in their name and fill in a couple. It was pretty much
like, I filled in maybe two or three things about the person
and then I could press send and send it to a bunch of people,
and they felt like it wasn't like, one of those mass emails,
but I feel like if I need anything in my life, I can just
make it or it's just – I can figure out how to make it.
So that's the part that I love.
So my research is with virtual spatial audio and one societal
benefit in that – so first, I'll explain what virtual spatial
audio is. Virtual spatial audio – you can think of it, if you
will – of a virtual environment in which a user can put on
headphones and through those headphones, they hear sounds as
though they're coming from actual locations in space around
that person. So it's a very broad topic, but the
applications of it are the societal impacts. So I'm
looking at ways to incorporate this into assistive technology
for blind people. So if we could augment not only giving
them turn by turn directions with these like, audio GPS
things but we can also have – let them listen through
headphones and hear the sound of the location they need to be
walking to, and the sound gets louder, and they can orient
themselves according to that. So that's one societal impact.
I also like to use it in terms of training for combat, any sort
of military training, lots of Department of Defense sorts of
training because they – there's lots of training simulations and
most of these, they're pretty similar to video games. So
having the spatial audio would help even more with the
immersion in that environment so they can get even more of a
realistic feel of what the whole environment would look like
and sound like once they get there. So those are
two immediate impacts.
My thinking as a scientist has been definitely influenced by
Dr. Freeman Hrabowski. Currently, he's been a president
of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. That's where
my undergrad university is. I was a Meyerhoff scholar there
and I can just recall him just – he's always challenging us to do
more, be better. Like, there was never a question of whether
or not we could do something. It's like, "Just how good are
you going to be when you do it?" So he's definitely – I came in
as a high schooler and kind of unsure about myself, unsure
about the college thing, but just one conversation with him,
you feel like you can conquer the world. So there was never a
question of, "Can I do this?" It was, "OK, if I don't think I
can do it, who can I talk to?" So this has always been my
motto: "If I don't know the answer, I'm going to find
someone with the answer and they're going to help me, and if
not, I'll find – I'll go to the next person." So that's really
driven like, my entire research career. It's giving me sort of
that drive or that just hustle as a – as a person in academia
where I've had colleagues who are like, "Oh, I don't know what
to do, I'll just take a zero." "No, so and so got 100
on the last exam. We're going to go find them and
see what's going on."
The thing that I think would surprise most people about my
field is just that it's not as sheltered or such an "inside in
the dark" programmer life that it seems to be depicted as on
TV. It's a very interesting field. Like, I've done research
with making educational software for kids where I got to spend
half a day in a kindergarten classroom and that's exciting.
So it's not an isolating field. Sometimes people think of a
programmer as someone who sits in the dark with their console
up and they just code, code, code until the wee hours of the
morning, drinking Mountain Dew and never coming up, but it's
definitely a field where you get to interact with people as well.
My data. I would definitely rescue my data if my office was
on fire. If it's on a server, I'm taking the server. If it's
on my time machine backup, I'm taking that. Whatever –
wherever my data is, that's where I'm going first.
Most often – I don't tend to play music in the car, but in
the lab – I'm a weirdo – I tend to listen to musicals and the
same musicals over and over. My favorites are, right now,
Wicked, Rent, I love the sounds from – the songs from Aida, I
love – it's – sometimes I'll have a favorite song from a
musical. So like, when I was defending my PhD, for some
reason, the song "Defying Gravity" from Wicked, that one –
like, that really got me through. I don't know. That's
hard to believe, but that one was – like, I would play it over
and over and over because it was – I just really connected with
it and there's a song from In the Heights where she talks
about not wanting to come home from college and be a failure,
and everyone's like – because she was the smartest one always
growing up, and everyone's like, "We're not worried about you,
you'll do the best," and she comes home from college unsure
of herself. She's like, "How do I tell all these people that
while I was away that I wasn't such a good student?"
So yeah, it really – a lot of the songs really hit home,
but I love musicals.