Week 3 Post 1

Today in the Robotics Laboratory, I was exposed to learning a lot of new concepts and materials. Mythra came today to check on my progress, and he was happy to see me being done with the previous tasks and getting ready to start the new ones. He told me a lot of new information, ways to learn and practice the concepts, and my overall goal for this project. I was overwhelmed with all the information at first, and I even found myself a little frustrated at the end of his further explanations of the project. However, this time I did not let the feeling of frustration overcome the joy of learning new material. Throughout this internship, I am learning about myself more and more, and I can see the slow and steady progress in overcoming negative feelings, procrastination, and getting excited about the opportunity to work in one of the best universities in the country. Today I can say that I am proud of myself and my growth, as I did not dive deep into any negative feelings, but instead, I used my newly learned strategies to break the habits of negative thinking and focused on the enthusiasm that I feel when working on the Arms. Today, I am happy to share that I learned more about convolutional neural networks, a class of artificial neural networks applied for analyzing visual imagery, and got a closer look at how these networks work from the inside. I talked with Mythra about my previous concerns about not understanding some of the complex topics that I learned in this project. Mythra ensured me that he would always be available to help if I didn't understand something, which is what he did today. He explained to me the way YOLO (You Only Look Once) works and its implementation with simple terms while drawing simple examples on the whiteboard. Such a willingness to help made me feel better, as I now know that I have a mentor who can guide me throughout working on this project. As I grow more as a computer scientist and a person, I am happy to invest more of my energy and creativity into the project of hand gesture recognition!

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