Week 1 Post 3

Today was quite a productive day. I had a meeting with Mythra who gave me and my teammate a presentation on the Arms and described different aspects of work that needs to be done. He started off by explaining what reinforcement learning is. As I reviewed the material that he sent me before, I already knew the basic idea of the process. However, today he decided to go deeper into the explanation because Mythra wanted to give us a chance to understand what the project is about. Mythra also let me choose what particular part of the project I would like to work on. He explained to us some concepts of computer vision, which included the explanation of the digital images that I am going to use when working on the Arms. This was the area of interest for me, as I chose to work on gesture recognition. I was fascinated by the option of learning image processing and open CV. Even though it sounded difficult to learn how to analyze and manipulate digital images, I decided for myself to accept that challenge as it offers rewards in terms of new knowledge and experience. I understand that it will require hours and hours of debugging the code to be able to manipulate the digital images; however, it will be very beneficial for my future as I am planning to enter the AI field as a researcher after finishing my Undergraduate and Master's degrees. Personally, I enjoyed learning more about digital images and the ways of manipulation, but I have some self-doubt about whether I will be able to work on such hard concepts while having very little experience with them. I am trying to get into a positive and productive way of thinking because I believe in the growth mindset and am trying to reward myself for the process of working instead of rewarding myself for accomplishments alone. So for me, I think I am doing great by not being afraid of studying the hard concepts and getting slightly better at them throughout the time. Even though I am only at the beginning of my journey of studying and working on AI, I feel passionate about building and designing gesture recognition for the Arms and creating my own data set for digital imaging.

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