June 18, 2025
Day 17 – New member alert!
What I Learned
Because tomorrow (Thursday) happens to be Juneteenth, the social enrichment program that usually occurs on Thursdays was moved to today. Dr. Mack started the day by reviewing the program details and their expectations from us participants, including during the mid-summer research presentation to be held next Friday. We then grouped together to create a 30-second pitch to present in front of the high school teachers’ cohort in the auditorium, allowing them to identify our project by just the pitch. For our group, we collectively prepared the pitch, and Ignatius represented us. We said something like, “We are using computer vision and deep learning techniques, like ensemble stacking on large pre-trained architectures, to detect facial cues such as eye closure and yawning in order to improve transportation safety.”
After all the groups presented their pitches, we had 10 minutes to prepare for a survival game called “Lost at Sea,” where we were stuck on a raft and given 15 items—like army rations and a shaving mirror—to sort in order of importance for survival. Due to time constraints, only a few groups were able to present their answers. We then went to the auditorium and presented our prepared 30-second pitch. The high school teachers instantly recognized us, and we all went to the main lobby area. There, we introduced ourselves and played an icebreaker game. After that, we returned to our respective lab buildings. Ignatius and I gave Eneah, our high school teacher, a mini tour of the CBEIS building, introduced her to our grad mentor Pelumi, and showed her our lab.
Afterward, we had lunch and then met in our lab, where Pelumi briefed Eneah on our project and the expectations for the program. I then sat down with Eneah and gave her a basic introduction to computer vision, deep learning, and, most importantly, convolution, explaining how it captures features in image datasets and aids in classification. I also showed her all 4 of our literature reviews, and she liked mine the best, so she started reading that one. Then I got to work on my model from yesterday.
Blockers
No issues faced.
Reflection
It was a fun yet challenging experience to summarize our entire 3-month project plan in under 30 seconds without using any keywords. While I don’t usually enjoy socializing events that much, it was nice to take a break from the lab, even though I found myself missing it at times because I recently came across an interesting model I want to implement before Friday’s presentation. Meeting our high school teacher, Eneah, was great; she seems really nice and will be super helpful during the literature writing phase, given her background as an English teacher.