Week 8 Post 3

It was a fruitful day today at work. Even though it seems like I did not make much progress in my project, I actually did make progress in my understanding of clustering with KNN and SVM algorithms. At the beginning of the day, I, as always, tried to understand these concepts on my own, but I was still stuck. After that, I tried to change my strategy and have someone explain it to me. Since Mythra is not back yet, I had Deepak, another Ph.D. student, explain it to me. In fact, he actually did a similar project with hand gesture recognition back at the University of New Delhi in India. He showed me the video that he and his teammate made when they finished the project. Basically, they used hand gesture movements to make the robot recognize some patterns (they used hand gestures, raising them up, down, left, and right). Once the robot recognized the pattern, for example, a hand up, it was programmed that way that it had to follow the algorithm in which it would play a song, or in the case of raising a hand, it would play the next song in their playlist on some music platform. Hand down meant that it would play the previous song, and so on. So the project that he was working on was pretty much the same as what I am doing. However, the difference is that he was doing it with a teammate, and both of them were studying for their Ph.D. when they started the project, meaning that they both had solid knowledge and understanding of reinforcement learning and computer vision. It is helpful to know that someone who has already implemented that idea is in the lab, so I do not feel like an outsider anymore, trying to get it all on my own. Now I am more confident in what I am doing, and hoping to accomplish implementing the KNN algorithm by the end of this week. I am most likely taking more time than Deepak, and his teammate did when working on that project, but it does not make me feel bad as I am only an undergraduate student who is interning for such a research project, and I had no prior experience in that field before. So it makes me proud to say that I am able to accomplish a lot as an intern, and I cannot wait to finish the project.

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