We have reached the end of our summer research experience and the feedback we have gotten from the PATHS-UP Community has been amazing! Creative posters, innovative presentations and awesome networking connections are only a few of the things you will be taking away from this experience. Let’s make one more entry into our time capsule and discuss your journey in machine learning. To assist in arranging your thoughts, please reflect on the following questions:
- How was the process of creating a poster and research presentation? Which parts did you struggle with? What new things did you learn?
- What do you plan to bring back to your school and talk to other students/teachers about regarding this experience?
- What are you future plans for working with the concepts you learned this summer?
Designing a poster came with many resources, as we were able to gather charts that could contribute to the visual side of the design. I was able to use Anaconda to obtain a graph that showed how the value of k in k-nearest neighbors could affect the accuracy of identifying malignant and benign tumors. Harder parts of the project included simply finding a good poster template that could contain the features and graph that I wanted to include, as most designs online were vertical which would not fit into my presentation. I was able to learn how adjusting various parameters and removing overlap could help a ML algorithm can improve accuracy rates in various tasks.
There are many things to talk about concerning the PATHS-UP internship program, one of the most important being the quality of the education that I was given through lectures with Dr.Straach and the guidance from my mentor Ankit. Being able to work with them allowed me to gain a phenomenal understanding of machine learning and other related concepts that without a doubt increased my interest for the field.
Future plans that I could work on include working with the diabetes data set from Scikit learn using different classifiers. Now that I have worked on the breast cancer data set with k-NN, I would like to move on towards different classifiers and data sets. Furthermore, I would also like to establish a more concrete accuracy range for the data set, meaning that I want a more precise and consistent range of possible accuracies.
These wonderful three weeks flew by so quickly, and I’m going to miss waking up to learn so much new and exciting information, whether it be from Dr. Straach’s lectures, our mentor sessions, or the guest speakers, and falling asleep after spending hours pouring over my research while gaining new insights!
Creating a research poster and research presentation was a newer experience that I really enjoyed, especially since I love to dabble in design. One part of the poster that I struggled with was condensing all my information and research in a manner that is not overwhelming yet not too simplified. I found that I had so much that I wanted to say and include in my poster, but it was important not to cram it with a seemingly excessive amount of information that would overwhelm the viewers. I also ran into a similar issue with my presentation, having to pick and choose between the most significant points that I wanted to include in each of the 30-second slides. From these struggles, I learned how to condense a large amount of information in a more concise way, including only the most important points in shortened phrases or sentences — less is almost always more. Another thing that I learned was how to organize my poster in a logical flow along with the necessary components of a research poster; for instance, an abstract is not necessary in the poster as it is a summary of the research, which is the purpose of the other sections of the poster.
As for what I plan to bring back to my school, I intend on sharing my research experience, poster, and presentation with my computer science teacher. I am also hoping to bring some of the machine learning skills and knowledge that I gained from this experience to the Girls Who Code club that I run, teaching our members how to create simple machine learning projects of their own and hopefully integrating machine learning into more of our curriculum.
In the future, I plan to dedicate some of my focus during my postsecondary education to studying artificial intelligence at a deeper level as I pursue a major in computer science. I also hope to pursue more research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which would give me the chance to apply the research and coding skills as well as technical knowledge that I gained from this program. Even if my future plans do take a sharp turn away from the computer science field, I am sure that in whatever career and field that I end up pursuing, the communication skills and technical knowledge I gained in coding and AI/ML will be invaluable.
The process of creating my presentation was far easier than I had expected. When the time came to complete my presentation I had already grasped a good understanding of python and machine learning so it was easy to collect my thoughts and present my research. The hardest part of completing my presentation was taking all the incredible information from my research and condensing it into a small poster and five minute speech. I had so much information I wanted to share on the three clustering methods I tested in my research. However, I had to prioritize only the most important information. Learning how to condense high level research and present it to people less familiar with the field is a very helpful skill I learned from completing my presentation.
At our campus we have a club called “Girls Who Code” and a club called “Women in Stem.” These clubs focus on introducing female students to careers in STEM and computer science concepts. As one of the officers in Women in Stem I will teach our club members about the amazing opportunities in the field of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer science. Furthermore, I will encourage the members of “Girls Who Code” to work on unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms in addition to the simple Java coding we usually focus on in the club.
My future plans in the field of computer science and machine learning are to pursue supervised machine learning projects as I focused on unsupervised machine learning during this internship. Furthermore, I would love to take more computer science classes and am considering minoring in computer science in college.
The process of creating the presentation and poster was relatively new to me. I didn’t know how I could ever compress 3 weeks into a 5 minute presentation or a poster, but after lots of thinking and a million edits I managed to narrow down the most important things and create a poster and presentation I was immensely proud of. I definitely struggled with practicing presenting because I wanted to talk about so much, but I had such little time which forced me to reevaluate the most important things making my presentation much more concise and put together. I learned how to put together a research poster and also how to better present my findings in an academic setting.
When I go back to school I can’t wait to spread the word about PATHS-UP. I have already been talking to my friends in younger grade levels about PATHS-UP and many of them want to apply or are thinking about it. I definitely plan on telling a couple of my teachers from the past year about it so they can pass the word on to their students this coming year. I’m also just excited in general to talk about the experience with my friends and tell them about everything I learned.
In the future, I definitely want to keep using machine learning. I want to try different clustering methods for the breast cancer dataset, and I also want to try new datasets. I would also love to try supervised machine learning algorithms next time, so I can get a feel for the other side of machine learning as well! The one thing I know for sure is that I want to keep working with machine learning in the future, and one day hopefully in college!
Overall, PATHS-UP was an amazing experience, and I am so sad its over. The entire team was so supportive and helpful, and I am so grateful for everyone’s help. Every minute was filled with learning and new opportunities to try something new. Thank you to everyone!