Learning Blog

 The symposium started with a presentation from Dr. Abouzahra. It mentioned some of the possible applications of A.I. in healthcare. However, he also listed some of the challenges. One challenge that resonated with me was the need for several countries with different demographics, diets, habits, etc. to combine data for better performance of A.I. tools. Particularly when it comes to diet, I feel U.S. doctors make well-meaning assumptions about the healthiness of traditional ethnic diets without knowing how healthy they really can be (with the right choices and proportions like any other diet). Dr. Abouzahra also demonstrated how A.I. responses can be tailored in language and tone for the end-user (for patients or doctors for example). Dr. Hsu’s presentation was about how A.I. tools can help meet the challenges of an aging demographic and short supply of health practitioners in many countries. I thought it was interesting to hear his example about how eye exams performed with the he...

I just finished looking through some of my oldest journals. It brought back memories from OLI's lessons on teamwork. Those lessons turned out to be very useful when working on team projects. I feel it boils down to promoting synergy within the group ahead of the goals of each individual. I'm glad that team projects were a component of every course in the program. The entries about things I was learning each week were the most interesting to me. I never really kept a regular journal before, not even a personal one. But I think I now see why people enjoy it. When we learn something new, as time goes on we lose track of what we felt when it was first introduced to us. For example, this makes me wish I could read through all the journal entries I had to write in elementary school as a kid. I'm glad I now have the opportunity to do that when reflecting on CS concepts I learned throughout this program. As far as the program itself, I'm extremely satisfied with my experience s...

Since last Tuesday, we met with our advisor Professor Tao (on Thursday) and provided him an update on our status. We also gave him a demo of the features we worked on. By that point I had already pushed my final coding changes to our team's repository. This week I worked on our presentation. I created our initial slides and a script based on our teams presentation outline. I recorded myself narrating over all the slides. I also recorded my interactions as a user with our project's main features so it can be included as our demo in our presentation. I used video editing software to put several clips together and trimmed down the time to fit the requirement as close as possible. It was fun working on video editing. I used iMovie which comes free with Macs. I'm still fairly new to it. For past presentations (for other courses) I would narrate over slides in one shot and then do a demo live in the same recording. I wish I had known how much easier the process can be with a bit ...

During week 14 I closed in finishing the Simkl integration. I created React components on the frontend. I added additional rate limits on requests sent form out app to Simkl's api to make sure we stayed within the limits outlined in Simkl's docs. I also pushed fixes to an earlier commit because their was a mismatch in the data we were expecting from a public API. I'm using Simkl's API to request our user's movie watchlist items and ratings (movies they rated within their Simkl account). I read through Simkl's docs again and realized I was pulling items into a response that we ddin't need. So I made a fix to an earlier commit. The plan next week is to finish the Simkl integration and start work on the randomization feature for the playlist page. No challenges at the moment. I had a Docker/permissions issue that didn't let me run the app locally for a while, but I was able to figure it out on my own and get that going again. No need for assistance at this ...