Weekly Log

Luise - DREU Research Intern

Week 9

It is scary how fast time goes by! I can’t believe that I have less than one week left in NYC and here at Columbia. But now that the end is approaching, I am doing everything I can to finish up the things I have been working on during my stay. At the beginning of the week, I still had a good deal of data I wanted to train recognizers with. Even though I have finished a significant portion of them by now, there are still some left that I really hope to wrap up next week before I leave. I know what to do and have prepared both data and “recipes” for training, but the real overhead is simply that training and decoding (for evaluating the recognizer) require a lot of time. It takes 1-2 days in total for each recognizer, so even though I can train a few of them at the same time, it will take a while to finish all of them.  I’ll keep my fingers crossed that it will all work out.
Since these are my last days in the city, I have been out and about experiencing some last great places in the city, had delicious dinners with friends and the enjoyed the sunset from a rooftop in Midtown. Also, this weekend I got to spend in Washington DC and Maryland with some friends from Berkeley. It was great to see them and fun to experience other parts of the East Coast. We had time to  both be touristy in DC and to relax in Maryland with my friend’s family, hang out by their pool, explore Baltimore harbour, play frisbee, get my first Coldstone ice cream, go horseback riding, and much more. I have really had some great trips during my internship in NYC, and it has been amazing to explore more of the country.