During this summer I was lucky to get the spot at Machine Learning Summer research intern with Professor McKinney. As a freshman student at Wabash College, I was really pleased that my first real work experience appeared to be with my Computer Science professor in my favorite sphere. We started our internship as a usual class where we were introduced to the common aspects of Machine Learning. However, after just several hours I noticed that one thing was way different from a normal class. My friend and intern colleague Tri An Lee and me were not students anymore, we were teachers for each other, including Professor McKinney.
We divided one colossal topic into several small subtopics, and everyone had some of them on his own. Then, by the end of the day or even the weak (if it was a hard one) we shared the new knowledge with each other. And it was one of the best parts of the internship. When I’m studying alone some tough topic, such as machine learning, sometimes I have to know about some topics beyond the actual machine learning, for example about advanced theories of linear algebra. Usually, I have to spend extra time to find the material and try to understand it. But luckily for me, during the internship, I didn’t face with this problem. I could ask Prof. McKinney about all stuff related to science and get an immediate clearly explained answer. This fact dramatically increased my productivity and allowed me to successfully write several models for different purposes.
Writing about the actual models that we did, I have to say that nothing can be better than a feeling when your model finally started to work after you spent hours coding it. I was responsible for making the recognition, object detection, and checkerAI models. Some of them were quite simple that didn’t require any computation power, such as a model that was designed to distinguish numbers, while others were really huge such as recognition models for decades of classes or checkerAI. Those models would still be training if Wabash didn’t help us. Especially for our internship, Wabash acquired the most powerful computer that I have ever seen. It was so powerful that allowed us to train models just in 5 mins when it would take 50 hours to train them on my machine. As a result, we were not limited by any obstacles and could even go beyond the horizons.
In the end, I want to say thank you so much to our lovely Wabash College and Prof. McKinney who allowed me to work with world-class professors and world-class computers. I’ll be always pleased that my first experience in IT happened on the campus of Wabash.
