Luise - DREU Research Intern
No big surprises: This week, I have spent this week training recognizers on yet more different data sets. This is really the essence of what I am doing. For every set, I do something slightly different, but the overall idea is the same. One thing we realized this week was that not all of our speech data was transcribed which we thought it were. Because we base the size of our datasets on the duration of audio, this basically meant that most of our datasets were in fact smaller than we thought. Therefore I am now retraining several recognizers - this time with the right amount of data. Even though it might seem as an annoying issue to find, it was actually somewhat relieving at the same time. Namely, the fact that we were working with a lot less data than we thought might partially explain why our results were slightly worse than expected. We’ll see how big a difference the new, correctly sized datasets will make!
Outside of work I have had a lot of fun as well. I went to the launch party for the book Cracking the Coding Interview at the Facebook headquarters, and to the new Whitney Museum of American Art where they have lots of interesting art and several beautiful terraces with a great view of the Hudson River and the city. Saturday, I had brunch with one of my roommates at a new place around the corner, and then went to East Village with a friend. We decided to walk across Williamsburg Bridge to the Smorgasburg food market in Brooklyn which is highly recommendable! As if that wasn’t enough fun and tasty food, I, my coworkers, and “alumni” from the lab all went to Julia’s (my mentor’s) apartment for brunch Sunday. It was a great way to get to chat with some of the people that I usually don’t talk that much with at work. Afterwards, I went for a short stroll in the heat and then headed to Queens with some friends where we had some delicious brick oven pizza for dinner. So much food and so much fun this week!