The end of Fall Quarter

Hello World!

Fall quarter is now over and I have two weeks off! And by that I mean I have two weeks to catch up on all the research that I didn't have time to do this quarter. For the record, this quarter was a pile of garbage. It was online, and I had to take an electrical engineering class which apparently is really not my thing! Oh well. The good news it, it is now over!

I decided that it was now time for me to drop out of OneLoop. While this may sound like a crazy decision, I actually think it was the right call. My project manager, Louk, ultimately wants to work in a HyperLoop company and I don't, so it didn't really make sense for me to be leading it since he wanted to do it, and therefore put more work into it, than I was. On top of that I'm a programmer and the team mostly needed mechanical engineers. So that definitely opened up some time for me!

Unfortunately, my AI research this quarter was a huge gigantic mess. I can't go into detail about exactly what I am working on because of the NDA but I can tell you that this is a plot of all of my data. As you can see, there is not really a pattern. Basically the way the plot works is that each embedding represents a word embedding. A word vector is when you have a word and you use one of the many possible methods (we used sent2vec which I will not go into) to turn it into a series of numbers. In our case it was 700 per word. Then we used t-SNE which plots the 700 dimensions as 2 dimensions and shows you the distance. But evidently, they did not work. Those red dots should have had some sort of pattern but they didn't. So this break and next quarter I will be getting to work on making better embeddings!

I used to be very good, or at least somewhat okay, at using Unity3d to do stuff. Unity3D is a software that is used to make very complex video games. If you guys remember, I'm programming a video game for my robotics professor. Turns out, I really do not remember how to use it so I've been re-learning it but the issue is that it tries to help you too much. What I mean by that is that it does weird things that are awesome when you know about them, but if you are just learning it's a big pain. For example, you can create a 'resources' folder and load things from it. But if you accidentally misspell it 'recources', like I did, you will be stuck fixing a problem for several hours. It's not super fun.

I finally got commissioned to program a website! I got referred by a friend and have been working on it. It's been an interesting process because I have no control over the design. I just do the programming, which I'm really not used to at all. This is interesting partially because I don't entirely agree with all the design decisions, but also because normally when I spend more than half an hour trying to get something to appear a certain way I'll just change the design, but this time I can't because it's what they asked for! Anyways the site is here.

Hopefully I will post more this quarter, it looks like it will be an easier one (I hope).

May you be ever victorious in your endeavors.
M.E.W