June 2, 2025
Day 5 – First in-person event, Spaghetti tower game, and Project case study
What I Learned
Today was our first in-person event day of this summer research program. The day started with introductions of faculty members, followed by us participants. After that, the CEAMLS director, Dr. Gabriella Waters, talked about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). She demonstrated this by separating the participants into two groups for a cookie-making activity, where one group used non-AI methods and the other used AI. This analogy demonstrated that RAG is used to train an AI model (LLM to be more specific) on the desired data, not just on the datasets it was previously trained on. She also asked some questions to the audience, most of which I was able to answer correctly thanks to my prior knowledge of machine learning.
We then headed out to the hall to take group pictures for program promotion. We returned to the auditorium, where Dr. Waters briefly discussed the topic of ethics in AI and its environmental implications. We then played a fun structure-making game where we’re given some spaghetti sticks, tape, and a marshmallow. The goal was to build the tallest structure with the items provided, with the marshmallow on top. Our group didn’t win sadly :(
After that, our graduate mentor, Mr. Pelumi, took us on a brief tour of the research lab at CBEIS. We had a half-hour lunch break, after which Mr. Pelumi went over the project description and goals. In this first in-person week, we’re supposed to conduct literature reviews of existing research on our topic. I brought some of my own papers that I found a week prior, which have also been helpful. We’re also tasked with completing the Intro to Deep Learning and Computer Vision course available on Kaggle, most of which I’m already familiar with but will still serve as a refresher.
Blockers
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Reflection
It was our first day, so it was obviously exciting. I got to meet my team members and mentors in person, and I am very eager to work with them. The literature review is a fun learning experience as it helps me become a better researcher. I already carried some literature review skills from my research assistantship at the Wireless Communications lab back at Mississippi State University, and doing the same here will further enhance my analytical and critique skills. Also, going through some of the Kaggle courses was a refresher for the concepts I learned last semester in my Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning class.
The thing I am most excited about is that I will get to write a research paper with my mentor. By the end of this summer, I will have 2 research papers under my name (one from the wireless communications lab, which is about using WGAN-GP + LSTM for UAV-to-ground wireless channel modeling), which will immensely help me in my research journey and graduate application as I look forward to specializing in AI/ML.