On Tuesday, I took Andric on a bike ride to a secret spot I had discovered. While I can’t disclose the exact location, I can tell you that the route led us along a scenic dirt path surrounding a field adorned with mulberry trees and black raspberry bushes. We couldn’t resist stopping to enjoy some delicious ripe berries. Later, we stumbled upon a cluster of bee hives and got close to them and enjoyed listening to the buzzing activity within the boxes.
Wednesday brought new challenges to our machine learning project as we encountered issues with getting the lab computer to utilize its GPU instead of the CPU. GPU processing would significantly speed up image processing, reducing the time required to create an epoch or iteration of training from two hours to a mere four minutes.
On Thursday, even though we hadn’t completed our project, we began working on our presentation. It was important to showcase what we had learned even if it wasn’t 100% complete. We also had the pleasure of attending a luncheon lecture by Carmon Gomez, who discussed sustainability in agriculture and food production. Her vibrant personality and integration of personal experiences with her research made for an incredibly enjoyable presentation. After work, Eliot, Sarah, and the rest of the VRAC bunch tried the task of making homemade pasta. . The process of handmaking pasta truly highlighted the amount of work and attention to detail required to create something completely from scratch. Later that night, my friend, Andric, and I joined in a game of disc golf near Freddy. To our astonishment, Andric proved to be a natural talent, consistently outperforming us with incredible shots. His skills were truly impressive, and he kept surprising us with his remarkable abilities.
Finally, Friday arrived, and we had the opportunity to present our Machine Learning project, allowing us to showcase our hard work to the rest of the VRAC community. It was a unique experience to give a presentation about a project we hadn’t fully succeeded in, but it was gratifying to walk through our process, explaining the obstacles we encountered and the steps we took to address them. Overall, I am glad I chose this project, and I am proud of my team for their dedication and effort in tackling the challenges we faced.
