August Update

Here’s a picture of Grand Central Station which I took because I miss NYC

So it’s been 5 weeks since my last update. I had lofty goals for the past month, so let’s see how I did:

— Work for my internship

I definitely did a lot of work for my internship over this past month. I learned about the entire data analysis pipeline and performed every step of it from organizing and understanding the data, to presenting my findings and constructing the final predictive models.

I think the main takeaway for me was to not underestimate the value of taking the time to understand the data, and not to overestimate the power of classifiers. Initially, I used the classifiers to do the feature selection for me and barely looked at the data, which lead to the construction of relatively poor models. But after taking the time to look through the data and actually decide for myself which features to keep and which to drop, I was able to make much better models.

— Work for my research with my Professor

This project is wrapping up quite nicely at this point. While the focus of my work shifted to automating and adding to the glossary creation system made by my professor, the original issue of how to evaluate the system is something I still have to figure out. But automating and adding to the system has actually been an interesting project as well.

— Publishing v 2.1 of my personal website and improving it further

Published! I added to my website and the current version is something I’m happy with for the time being. However, I think when I have the time, I’m going to use a bootstrap template for my next iteration. Designing my own site was fun and challenging, but now that I know I can at least potentially design a full site on my own, I think using a template is better, mainly due to the better designs available.

— Work for this new project I’ve started with some of my other friends

This project, which is like an interactive escape-room style experience is something I have worked on for a month and a half now and I can gladly say it’s being wrapped up nicely and will be fully completed by the end of the summer. I’m really happy with the work we did and I think it’s a really awesome experience.

— Improving and expanding the Babbage Patch

While I think the format and structure of the meetings is a lot better and smoother, I was not as active in expanding the club this month. I’m holding off until the semester to start bringing on new people, but I think over the next couple of weeks I will resume advertising for this group and inviting new people to join starting in September. Unfortunately, I’m planning on keeping it relatively NYU exclusive for now, as it is essentially an NYU club, but for anyone interested in joining this group, please let me know!

— Starting the idiom translation website after publishing v 2.1 of my personal website

I have not started this website yet but I still plan on pulling it up by the end of the summer. My site-building skills are a lot better and I’m a lot faster at constructing a website from start to finish. The only part I would need to work on, however, is connecting my python scripts to my React front end. I know there are a bunch of ways to do this, but I think that will be the most difficult part.

This is the list of “main projects” I am working on. In terms of my “personal projects”, I plan to:

— Practice piano and guitar on some regular basis

— Actively study Korean, even at a very very very slow pace

— Read about 30 min every day, ideally 50 pages a day (which might take longer) because 50 pages a day is like a book a week (which still puts me way below the amount of how many books I want to read over the summer).

I regret to say that I did none of these. While I occasionally played the piano and guitar, I wasn’t very regular with either of them. And I didn’t read everyday either.

However, although I didn’t explicitly study Korean, I have been practicing it conversationally and have definitely gotten a lot better. I can understand a lot more and I can feel my speech and writing becoming a little more natural, as per the feedback I’ve gotten so far. But, I still would like to study it through my textbook as vocab is the one thing I think I need to study a lot more.

That’s my review of the previous month. My last year of college starts right at the start of September so until then, here are a few things I would like to do:

1. Complete my internship work. I mean, this will happen at the end of this month, but what I mean to say is that I would like to complete the new task I have just been assigned by the end of the month.
2. Finish the research work I have done with my Professor over the summer and write up any necessary documentation. I think I will be done with my system by next week at which point we just have to test it to make sure it works as expected. Then I just need to write a readme for the system I made and that should nicely conclude that section of the research project.
3. Have people play through the online experience I made with my friends. We still have to make a landing page for people to sign up, but when that is complete I will make sure to spread the word about it so that people can play through the experience we spent all summer making!
4. Expand the Babbage Patch. I need to do a lot more advertising for that and so my goal will be to get a few more people to sign on before the semester starts.
5. Build the idiom translation website. I want to actually build the page itself as soon as possible so that I can spend more time connecting the different parts together. My hope is to finish the complete website by the end of the month, or at least complete a useable version by the end of the month, even if I have to go back and update it.
6. Finish the showcase website I have built with a friend of mine. I am building a website for NYU students to post about the research and projects they have done at NYU to showcase the awesome work that students do here! If you are a student at NYU, please look out for our website which will be up soon and message me so I can make sure to send you an email about where to submit your work.

Once again, that’s a lot for just two weeks, but it’s mostly wrapping up projects which is something I’m happy about. I’m glad to see that I was able to accomplish mostly everything I set out to do this summer and I’m hoping I’ll be able to close it out nicely with more than a few complete projects.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading and see you in two weeks!