Blog #11
What did you do this past week?
This past week, my partner and I got started on the Darwin project. We laid down the framework for this project by creating all the necessary classes and how they are going to relate to one another. We also got the input down, so we are able to read in the input and put them into the necessary data structures. Outside of this class, I spent most of my time doing work for my peer mentor position for an FRI course. They are learning the principles behind neural networks and I was in charge of ensuring they at least understood the basics. On the same note, I was also working on my own research. I obtained the student license for Mujoco in order to continue our robotics research without an actual robot. In my algorithms, we had a take-home test, which took a pretty good chunk out of my time this week.
What’s in your way?
In my way this week was mainly my algorithms test. I didn’t really feel like I had a very good grasp on what was happening in the class in the recent past.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I will finish the Darwin project and hopefully make good progress in my research, hopefully finishing the setup of our new adapted framework.
What was your experience of vector? (this question will vary, week to week)
My experience of vector was pretty good. It was very interesting to know the back-end implementation of a data structure I use all the time. Learning about the defaults that C++ gives to user-defined types was also useful.
What was your experience of the ethics material? (this question will vary, week to week)
After being in the computer science major for almost 2 years, I am well aware of the stereotype that people in the tech industry make very poor ethical decisions. With this in mind, this ethics material was very nice and important for future software engineers.
What made you happy this week?
This week, getting through my algorithms test was pretty nice. It went a lot better than I thought it was going to. Normally, there is at least one curveball question that involves out-of-the-box thinking, but this test was fairly straight forward.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is PyTorch. If you ever want to do work with neural networks, PyTorch is a really easy way to do so. It has very nice documentation and is very intuitive and simple to use. While neural networks are seen as a pretty complicated computer science topic, they are actually fairly easy to implement and use.
