I landed in the Twin Cities at around 10 am. It's my first time in Minnesota, so I'm excited to experience a new environment! It was very hot today which made for a very tiring exploration of the city/campus. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the environment of the UMN campus. It's a more urban environment than at BGSU which I really like. There's a lot of beautiful buildings and cool places here. I checked into my campus housing at 17th avenue dormitory. It's on the edge of campus, so there are amazing views of the stadium, campus, and the city throughout the building. The room is nice and spacious and there are a multitude of lounges to work and hang out in. I have a roommate named Kate who is very nice. I look forward to getting to know her! Being here feels a bit surreal. Just a few weeks ago I didn't have any plans for the summer, but now I'm in Minnesota doing research! Crazy stuff. But I really look forward to my first day tomorrow and meeting everyone. Week 1
My first day started with orientation. This consisted of meeting everyone in the program and an overview of the summer research experience. We learned about UMN’s mission for the Big Data REU which is to help us better our research schools and to consider graduate school. Then we started our first Big Data lesson. We are utilizing a course from UC Berkeley called Data8. It’s a bit daunting to take on a full semester class in 3 weeks, but I’ll try my best! On Wednesday we had a nice luncheon with our mentors. I got to meet my mentor, Haiyi Zhu. She specializes in HCI(Human Computing Interaction) and does numerous studies on social network platforms like Facebook, Wikipedia etc. I’m really glad I have been paired with her because I find this field of study and her research very interesting. After the luncheon we were introduced to our labs. So I met the other undergraduate students (there are 4 of us) and the other professor whom Haiyi is collaborating with for the summer.They explained the big picture of what the projects they want to work on for the summer. We will be working to develop and improve a site called Movielens. This site is a movie recommendation service for those times you can’t make a decision. In addition, we will be exploring how to best develop a way to do recommendations for groups of people, in order to implement to Movielens. The projects aren’t determined yet, but there will most likely be 3 components. Technical, User study, and Analytics. We each picked 2 of the 3 that we would be interested to work for. I chose the User Study and Analytics project, as those seemed the most interesting to me. Much of the details are unknown this week, but I’m excited for the meeting on Monday to further discuss the project! Later, there was more to do! We had another orientation. And then, it was time for pizza and bowling for all the REU programs. In all honesty, I mostly went for the the pizza, but bowling was really fun! I got to bond with the other students in my program and have lots of fun with them. The last 2 days of the week simply involved data bootcamp in the morning and lab in the afternoon. Since neither the user study or analytic project has been planned, I just read up on related studies and on AI services like the Amazon Alexa for the Echo.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorHi! My name is Mary Solomon and I'm from Northwest Ohio. I'm a rising Junior studying Data Science with a music minor at Bowling Green State University. I plan to graduate in May 2019.. Archives
August 2017
Categories |