RIT CIS Internship

This post is about yesterday (August 16th). First, we had our last morning meeting. Joe talked to us about the internship program and asked us if we had any suggestions for or comments about it. I didn't really have any, but others said they would have liked a tour of the different labs on the first day of the program. It was also my last day in the kLab. I began by tying up some loose ends. I uploaded my data and other necessary files to Google Drive so that Ron could access them after I left. I also continued to run my feature extractor experiment. It appears that I will not finish all of the tests for that in time, but at least Ron will have the first part of the data for it. I also continued trying to fix the CRF (Conditional Random Field) postprocessor with the grad student who was working on postprocessors, but that also took a long time to run before it even got to the error. After lunch, I did not have much to do, because my programs were still running, so Ron had me work o

We began in the auditorium this morning to practice our presentations. Overall, it seems like everyone's presentations are pretty good. I gave mine third because I will going third on Thursday. I'm glad I am near the beginning of the schedule because I think it would be difficult for me to focus on the other presentations if I was yet to give mine. My presentation today seemed to go well. I was just over ten minutes (the amount of time each individual presentation is supposed to take before questions), and I only had to make a few minor corrections to my slides (such as adding an acknowledgement page). After all of the presentations were done, it was about 12:00, so Ryan and I ate lunch before going to the lab. I had not been able to run my feature extractor experiment overnight, so I started it when I got to the lab and it is still running now. Hopefully, it will continue to run and the results will be ready tomorrow. Since I already gave my practice presentation in the audito

At the morning meeting today, we turned in our presentations to Joe. I knew I would have to make changes to it later though. Soon after getting to the lab, Ryan and I practiced our presentations in front of those in the lab. I felt like my presentation had improved since last time. After that, I worked on the revisions to my presentation that Ron and the others had suggested. I also ran some of the tests for my feature extractor experiment. I will try to run more of these tests overnight, but the software we use in the kLab to do so is difficult, and I have previously tried and failed to get it to work. A little while after lunch, Ron had Ryan and I give our presentations again so we could have more practice. This time there were more people in the lab than before. After that, I made a few small edits then gave the updated version of my slides to Joe. Tomorrow, we interns will give our presentations in the auditorium to prepare for Thursday.

Today I continued working on the feature extractor experiment. Ron and Ryan needed all of the GPUs to run their experiments, so I had to figure out how to run mine on a CPU. Ryan and I also did practice presentations in the lab today. I went first because I was before Ryan on the presentation schedule draft Joe handed out at the morning meeting. I think my rehearsal was good for a first try, although I did get stuck in one spot trying to explain the SVM-RBF classifier. After I was done, Ryan gave his presentation, which I thought was good. He seemed like he fully understood his research. After the rehearsal, Ron talked to us individually about our slides, and I made corrections to my presentation. This weekend I hope to be able to run my feature extractor experiment, as it will likely take a long time.

I finished my postprocessor experiment today. Fortunately, that experiment was much faster than the others so far. The last postprocessor, CRF (Conditional Random Field), took a much longer time to run than MRF (Markov Random Field) and also turned out to be less accurate. Ron thought this was suspicious, so he had me send the results and data to another grad student who is working on postprocessors. I also finished up my slides for my presentation (except for the slides that I might add later about the experiment I am doing now). I added the new results and planned the points I will talk about. Ryan and I are doing presentation rehearsals in the lab tomorrow to see how well prepared we are. Also today, I started another experiment, which was to evaluate feature extractors. I worked on setting up the code to run that experiment, and I still have a few issues that I need to fix. I should have the experiment running tomorrow.

I finished my classifier experiment today. The only classifier I had left to test was the SNN (Self-Normalizing Neural Network). I had it narrowed down to two combinations of parameters, so I decided to run thirty trials on each of them and see which one performed better. I got to the lab early today, so I started running those and went to the morning meeting. At the meeting, we each described where we were in our projects and said how prepared we were for the presentation. My PowerPoint was about half done and I said I was just finishing my second experiment (the classifiers experiment). After I got back to the lab, the tests I was running crashed because the network connection was lost, so I had to restart them. That was a bummer. When I finally finished those tests, I added the results from the best parameters to my results table. After that, I began my next experiment, which should take less time than my previous experiments. It is to evaluate postprocessing methods. I already had