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Week 11 Post 1

This is the last official day of my internship, according to my internship proposal. I decided to come to the lab just to get into this environment full of creative people one last time. Honestly, I am going to miss this lab, the project that I worked on, the people in the lab whose creativity inspired me to strive for more, and the atmosphere of this place in general. This is one of the best schools in engineering in the country, and I am very grateful for having an opportunity to work with such amazing and experienced professionals in the field of Robotics and AI. My journey here was not flawless, and of course, I had some obstacles and challenges on my way throughout this internship. However, those obstacles and challenges did not stop me from accomplishing my goals and proving to myself that I could become who I am meant to be. I feel so much more experienced and knowledgeable after this internship because I had never thought that I would be able to work on such novel for me things...
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Final Reflection

  It has been two and a half months working as a research intern in the Collaborative Robotics Lab at Purdue University. Words cannot describe how grateful I am for the experience and knowledge gained during the internship. When I first started, I could not possibly imagine that I would be able to go this far in understanding, analyzing, and researching the hard concepts, structures, and algorithms in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. As I worked mostly with AI, I have a lot to say about the progress that I have made as a researcher in this field. Starting off with the first few weeks in the lab, I can say that I felt overwhelmed and frustrated with all the new information and tools that I needed to comprehend and implement. I was hoping to work in a team of other research interns so that I would be able to collaborate and solve problems with other people. However, I had to work by myself as all the interns were assigned to different projects. At first, it scared me because I w...
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Week 10 Post 3

Reflecting on my overall journey, I can say that I am proud of myself for growing into a passionate researcher as I wanted to be when I first started this internship. I can say that every experience that I have had here in the lab so far has shaped me into the professional that I am today. I have never been so confident in my abilities as a responsible employee as well as in my technical and soft skills. I am extremely grateful for choosing this opportunity for my summer 2022 internship. Before I started this program, learning new things and tools seemed scary to me, especially doing it all by myself and without a mentor or a teacher who could guide me, so I was doubtful about this experience. However, now I can say that it all turned out to be false and that I need to trust myself more. For my final days here in the lab, I can say that I dived even deeper and at a faster pace into the research and achieved many goals that I set for myself. I finally resolved the problem with interpola...
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Week 10 Post 2

Today was an interesting day that let me explore new things and tools. I thought that in my last week there would not be anything new but, apparently, I was wrong. Since last time I was not able to fix my interpolation problem yet, so I tried to see where in the code I was going wrong and what resources other people suggested on Stackoverflow and other platforms. The problem is with my NumPy arrays and the distortion of the differences in the range of the values. I tried to implement various solutions, and none of them worked. None of the CS classes that I took were teaching machine learning or AI, so the situation became more overwhelming for me because I wanted to finish the classification problem before leaving Purdue. So, I tried to ask people in the lab, and there was another undergraduate intern who wanted to help. I was amazed by the knowledge of that person, and he is only a sophomore in his undergraduate degree. The way he thinks fascinated me because his idea of understanding...
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Week 10 Post 1

Today I finally met with Mythra for the first time after five weeks of him being absent from the lab. Since the morning, I have been excited to meet with him and show him the progress that I have made throughout my journey as a researcher. I had everything prepared for the meeting, all the files with code and all the files from my dataset. In fact, Mythra is one of the most intelligent and experienced people in the CS and AI field that I have ever met, so I was a little nervous to show him the things that I have been working on because I know they are not perfect and still need some improvement. The moment Mythra looked at my code, he understood all the problems and ways of fixing those problems. It turns out that my kNN algorithm is not working correctly with my dataset because the data points on my scatterplot were not normalized before I interpolated the data points. Apparently, I have to go back to normalization of my dataset before going into interpolation and interpolate everythi...
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Week 9 Post 3

I start realizing that I am coming to the end of my journey at the Collaborative Robotics Lab. It feels sad because I am used to working on something that I am passionate about and being independent in what I am working on. Also, I am sad because I am used to the creative people around me, working on projects that have never been explored before by other people, which daily gave me the inspiration to pursue my passions in AI. It feels like I always belonged to this lab and worked here for years, instead of two months. I do understand though that it is not the end because I might have an opportunity in the future to join this lab as a graduate student or a Ph.D. student. On the good side, I am getting progress on my kNN algorithm. I was able to fix the bugs that occurred last time, and I started getting the clustering that I needed. It seems like it is working; however, I am not sure if that is what I need exactly. The way I see the project, it goes exactly how it is supposed to go, but...
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Week 9 Post 2

It has been a good day at work. I accomplished many things, even though not everything went the right way. I am getting better at coding for sure, and that makes me proud because the things that I am coding are not simple programs but are actually AI-based things. My first accomplishment is that I have finally written the code for the KNN algorithm. In fact, I made a function calculating Euclidean distance to be able to find the nearest neighbors of my datapoints and cluster them together. That part went well. As for the rest, I was able to write the code for loading my data for the KNN algorithm, as well as writing the train() function to train my dataset to form clusters based on the k value. After that, I wrote the function called predict(), which predicts the future data points that will be in my dataset. This step is important because it helps generate new data in the dataset, and I need it because my dataset is very small for reinforcement learning since I did only 80 videos of m...
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