Week 6 Post 2

Today I was trying to assess the progress I made while working on hand gesture recognition. I can say that I dived into this project with zero knowledge about the topic. I had to spend days researching the topic and resing the papers, as well as learning convolutional neural networks, libraries, and languages that I have never used and practicing them. I also had to learn how to work by myself only, which was a downside of this internship. I consider it a downside because, in comparison with all the classes that I have taken at Berea College, I don't remember many classes where the assignments did not require pair-programming. I consider pair-programming an important aspect of any computer scientist professional. So, for me, having to work by myself is a pretty hard task to do. Mostly, it is because I have no one to ask when I get stuck, and I cannot see the problem I am working on from another perspective than my own. These are the challenges that I faced while working on the project. However, there is also a good side to working on the project. One of the biggest advantages that I see is the experience of independence in such a valuable field as AI. I heard from Dr. Voyles at the beginning of my internship that we, the interns, are free to do whatever we want in terms of exploration. He said that as long as we are using our creativity and curiosity, we are free to choose an existing project to work on or create our own. That is the freedom of choice in the research that I have, which I usually do not get in class projects at school. So, while this internship has advantages and disadvantages, I am happy to experience such an opportunity to work in academia. The progress on the current task of my project is slow because I am still trying to understand how to plot the x and y coordinates of the centroid on the scatterplot. As of now, all I get is one point in the middle of the scatterplot, which does not move along with the hand moving in different directions. I feel a little frustrated that I am stuck on this task; however, I still have many other options to try to resolve this issue. Overall, I feel like I am doing great at working on the project, considering all the circumstances.

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