Busy Week

Cluster 12 has had a busy week!  We started off the week with some guest speakers from Engineers for Exploration (E4E).  They were all current students (from undergrad through PhD) who were working on various projects that dealt with conservation, ecology and/or environment.  Their research ranged from baboons in the wild to fish in the ocean.  It was fascinating to see how machine learning is used to help protect our environment and animal species. 

We got a chance to talk with them afterwards to learn more about their own personal journey.  Not everyone's path was straight and direct and it was good to hear that you can come back from setbacks.

On Tuesday, our Discovery Lecturer (an all-COSMOS presentation) was from a data scientist.  We could relate to much she had to say.  Then we got time to work on our ethics essays.  The ethics essay is part of a COSMOS essay contest where we'll find out the winners at the end of COSMOS.  The prizes are gift cards!  

To celebrate our cluster's birthdays during COSMOS, Shirley brought in homemade cupcakes!  Both the cupcake and frosting were made from scratch!  Happy birthday to Jasmine, Ben and Cheryl!

For the next few days, we learned about Neural Networks and why it's important to not over-train our model.  We began to apply machine learning to images and began on our next project which will we be presenting next week.

Thursday, we heard from a COSMOS alumni panel which included a some former UCSD COSMOS students who Curt and Shirley had in their cluster and our current Cluster Assistant Henry!  It was interesting to hear about their experiences and how it shaped who they were and what they are doing.  One is a current UCSD professor (doing Cluster 10 and participated in one of the first COSMOS programs at UC Irvine), others had been out of college for about 5 years, one just graduated from college and is spending the summer doing cyber privacy and security research in Germany, and one a current college student in data science.

We had an on-campus field trip to 

Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute

.  Saura was our host and shared about HDSI and the Data Science Process.  We then had an activity in which we worked in teams of 3 to create a proposal for a project where we collect data - any data we think we'd need - to provide a solution to our proposed problem.  We went to different areas around the Geisel Library's Snake Path to get inspiration.

Today, we learned about how good our machine learning models/systems are and what things we had to keep in mind and consider to make it more fair and unbiased.  We'll finish up our neural network project and present on Monday.  We're making our own application which uses drawing/images that we've modeled.