Luise - DREU Research Intern
Now that I have been here for quite a few weeks, I realized that my favorite part of work is formatting the datasets and putting together the new recipes for training. The subsequent training is pretty much just about executing the plan which I find less stimulating. For that reason I was happy to get my hands on a new and BIG dataset this week. It contains thousands of utterances adding up to more than 2000 hours of recorded audio, and I thought it was a lot of fun to work with such large amounts of data.
My mentor Prof. Hirschberg introduced weekly Lab Talks recently, so every Wednesday one person in the lab gives an informal presentation on what (s)he is working on while we all listen, have cookies, tea and coffee. This week it was my turn to present, so I prepared a few slides, and told everyone about speech recognition, my results, challenges and plans for the rest of my internship. It went well, and I got a lot of good questions from my co-workers, so we got a good chat going.
This weekend the weather was amazing, and I was fortunate to spend the weekend with some family friends in their beautiful summer house in upstate NY. It was sunny and in the high 80’s, so it was a perfect time to get out of the city, go raspberry picking in the wild, play tennis, hang by the pool, take a swim, and eat some delicious food. I only have a few more weekends left before I go home to Denmark, so I am absorbing and enjoying as much as I can while I’m still in NY!