A typical day for a knowledge engineer

Today is Wednesday, January 28, 1998. It has been, for the most part, a normal day with no surprises. When I was younger (okay, a lot younger), a surprise usually meant getting or doing something exciting and fun. Now, surprises at work can mean frantically writing a document of some sort that my manager needs as soon as possible (which means NOW) or finding out I get to travel somewhere, usually to Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston. But like I said, today did not have any surprises.

Being a Wednesday, today was my turn to drop Leah and Patrick (my two kids) off at school. Also since it's a Wednesday, I carpooled into work today. I am lucky that a friend works nearby so we can occasionally share the long drive to and from work. It's 9:25 a.m. when I finally arrived at my office at NASA Ames Research Center. The first thing I always do when I get to work is check my email, and as usual, I had about seven or eight messages waiting for me to read. None of the messages required any action or response on my part, so I continue the work I was doing yesterday.

My current job is developing a software program called Principal Investigator-in-a-Box, or PI-in-a-Box for short. This program will be used by the Neurolab crew during the instrumentation phase of the Sleep Experiment. The Sleep Experiment requires the crew to wear numerous electrodes which will measure all sorts of information about the human body while they are sleeping in microgravity. Putting all of the electrodes on, or instrumenting, takes a lot of work and it is crucial that these electrodes be put on properly. This is where PI-in-a-Box helps out. We, the developers of PI-in-a-Box here at Ames and at MIT, have tried to capture some of the expertise of the Sleep Experiment principal investigators (these are the scientists who've designed this experiment) and put this knowledge into a computer program.

Every once in awhile, I stop my work to read and reply to email. Today the email came from the scientists and engineers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and from Brigham & Woman's Hospital (BWH), which is where the principal investigators for the Sleep Experiment are from. Some of the email is from the people at JSC who are helping us put this experiment together.

At around 11:58 a.m., when I would rather be eating lunch or exercising, I got a phone call. This call is the "telecon," or teleconference, which happens at this time every other Wednesday and includes people from UCSD, BWH, JSC, and myself at Ames. Altogether, there are 15 of us joining in on the telecon and we discuss primarily the baseline data collection session (which is where the scientists collect data before the Neurolab flight) scheduled for next week and the MITS, or Mission Integrated Test Simulation, which will occur later in February. Having a telecon with 15 people usually lasts a long time, since everybody has something to say, and this telecon is no exception. At 1:38, or 1 hour 40 minutes after it started, the telecon is over.

I ate a quick lunch at my desk and got back to what I was doing before the telecon. The afternoon is pretty quiet with only a single other phone call, a discussion with a colleague about the Neurolab mission, reviewing my travel plans for February, and a few more email messages. Since I carpooled today, it was important that I leave on time to pick up my friend. At 5:22 I turn off my computers and leave for the day. I can't wait to get home to see my wife and kids.

Today was pretty much a typical day. When I don't have a telecon at lunch time, I try to either exercise at the fitness center here at Ames or go for a long run. Some days I'll have a meeting or two to attend, but I didn't today. For the most part, today was typical.