Junior fall

December 27, 2020

The quarter schedule really throws me off. 10 weeks feels like a really short amount of time, but also, the UW expects us to complete a full course in this timeframe, and we somehow do. Go dawgs?

Anyway, I figured it would be nice to do light recap for this last quarter with photos. (so I also don’t have to write as much)

sunset sound of the ocean + sunset

Before the quarter began, I went camping in Oregon! It was nice to get some good vibes before hopping back to Zoom university.

smiles the sun snuck out beneath the clouds!

yeah, we’re student athletes

Not pictured here, the RV lot that we unwittingly joined, the scrumptious hamburgers, and the rainy bunkers.

Nothing to see here, just boiling some water

This trip gets included in the quarter recap because on the way there, we had to attend a meeting. (Also, I just wanted to include some more smiley images, so sue me).

Big shoutout to TacoTime for passable Wifi

Decided to go do some shopping with Daniel before school started to get some fresh fits.

looking sharp there, also covid = no dressing rooms

Goodbye Nila, I’m off to school!

bye weirdo ~ Nila, probably

So school started which was cool! This person also stopped by occasionally :))

pizza and cool person

And this dog also stopped by too :))

I taught the first graders for Sunday school. The kids are really funny, and one of the kids showed up super early and wanted to draw flags.

China and France and attempts at some iconic structures

I also learned a really easy but tasty meal from my roommate Brian. Just stick chicken thighs in oil on medium heat, flip once, add salt, pepper, whatever, and wait until ready. (It’s a little messy, but really good)

pardon my unaesthetic photos tho lol, i promise it’s good

See, the kale is alright, but the chicken is carrying this meal

DubHacks came around too and we assembled our team, DubHacks Resort: Daniel, Jake, Andrew, Me and rip Esther who was too busy for our shenanigans. We created a room for conferences and zoom calls where students can react anonymously to give live feedback to the speaker! It also utilizes emotion recognition models to gauge the users as well. You can check it out here: Room Temperature.

Thermometer’s looking a little off for this room, I’d say it’s pretty hot.

Even though we didn’t get the bread, we got some sushi and other delicious meals instead. Would recommend Ku Sushi, 50% off always, but 100% delicious

On a slightly related note, our previous hackathon project: Orange Juice Hologram found another user. (s/o Ashley :)))

We got a long weekend, so I went hiking with some of my high school friends! We almost got lost though, but thankfully we had GPS and we found the correct trail after heading in the general direction and finally crawling underneath a giant log. I’ve never been more glad to see some muddy, beaten path.

Okay Cambridge

Marten Lake, not too shabby

This next picture was the beginning of the trail where it forked off of the main path, so I’m honestly impressed that we found our way back. Glad Asya had done this hike before, otherwise we wouldn’t have had the confidence to keep walking through the bushes in the first place either.

This is the trail, trust me ~ Asya

For some other highlights this quarter, I went back to TA’ing again! I ended up with an 8:30 AM section, and the attendance was incredible, also speaking for myself too since I managed to wake up somehow. Basically every student showed up for section which kinda blew my mind. Another highlight was head TA’ing with some really cool people.

Shake Shack with TA’s and (unpictured: unused basketball b/c we’re nerds :,))

Some walks and other COVID sanctioned activity highlights: New park!

Scooters and late night downtown Seattle and a ticket

I voted

Got a new coat

Yeah, I know what I’m doing, I took photography 131

A walk

A run

Take-out pho is not a great experience

Getting my Amazon employee ID photo taken finally

I’d crash Daniel and Jake’s room to cook some better meals. Here’s a taste: Season the board not the steak 😩

The fancy italian youtube video guides are an essential

Safeway closed.

Very tragic.

The last few days. I wish I bought some more detergent

I wasn’t really a fan of the online learning experience, and by finals week, this meme felt particularly relevant.

thanks r/udub

So Academics

Up to now, most of my quarters have been at around 12-13 credits, but since I recently started working on an entrepreneurship minor, this quarter, I ended up taking 18 credits. (That, and I haven’t really been diligent about completing my other general education credits…)

Deep Learning

For this class, we got to just implement various practical applications of DL models.

reinforcement learning for lunar lander. this one’s still learning

For our final project, we worked on creating models to generate text as well as surveying the text to voice technology that can mimic any voice. You can read more about our project, and checkout our video overview and live demo here: seal-scripts

Algorithms

This class was pretty interesting. We learned about various computer programming algorithms like dynamic-programming and greedy solutions. While the questions were interesting to think about, writing it up in LaTeX is consistently annoying.

CHID - Weird Comics

I somehow stumbled upon this class, trying to fulfill my VLPA credits. I’m glad I took it since I don’t think I would have encountered any of the ideas brought up in this class, and Dr. Caroline Simpson is a great professor! We read weird comics like Ant Colony, Sabrina, and My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

Intro to Entrepreneurship

For this class, my team, The Business Side™️ developed a new product idea called BOCKS. (A backronym for Bringing Our Customers Killer Security). It addressed the issue of package theft with a locked smart enclosure that your packages would be shipped in. We would then reduce costs by reusing the containers.

Directed Research Group: HCDE NLP

I was attracted by the description of this research group: “This research group will apply human-centered techniques to the field of natural language processing (NLP) to study very large text corpora. We’re looking for students with experience in either (a) programming and analysis of large text datasets or (b) machine learning and data science.”

This was a great experience, and to wrap up the quarter, I got to write up an investigation post! In summary, I analyzed reciprocity using time-shifted serial correlation. In summary, I showed that the technique was too simplistic to create generalizations for the entire community, but there are some interesting subresults that can be seen.

graphs 👌

(I also volunteered for manual labeling of some data which was insightful but also quite tedious. Unclear why I do things like this sometimes… -.-)

TrueFidelity

This is another research project where I created a labeling site for an radiology experiment. The premise is to see if this new image generation model (which uses less radiation) can be used to replace other techniques for denoising the data. If labelers can accurately find and measure the lesions with this new technique vs. old ones, then it would demonstrate its viability.

click and measure the side with the lesion