Week 4

Monday (7/31)

Cluster 12 started off their week by getting right to work on their final projects in the morning. They also had the opportunity to listen to Professor Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick talk about Machine Learning and its use in deciphering the text in historical documents. He specifically talked about using Markov models in his research which is what some students used for their NLP projects. Following lunch, students were busy working on their final projects during the lab time as the presentation day is coming up on Friday. As a fun surprise, Cluster 12 sang Happy Birthday to Ms. Miranda! 

Tuesday (8/1) Students began their day working on their final projects. All of the projects use different concepts they learned throughout these 4 weeks such as clustering, classification, and natural language processors. Additionally, everyone listened to a science communication lecture on how to create abstracts for their projects and formatting their final presentations. Then, Professor Curt gave a lecture on convolutional nerual networks, which is a key part in many projects. As students approach the end of COSMOS and the final presentation, they experiment with different techniques and Python libraries for their final projects. Some groups ran into trouble with new libraries such as the Keras library, but with the help of the TA’s and professors they were able to work their way through it. 

Wednesday (8/2) 

The whole day was dedicated to wrapping up final projects. The pressure was on each group to finish their projects, create a slideshow, record a demo, and construct a virtual poster board. The teaching assistants scrambled to help everyone. At the end of the day, the teaching assistants demonstrated one legged squats and got many students to try!

Thursday (8/3)
Students were given an hour to prepare their presentations and finalize their work. In the morning, students gave mock presentations of their projects and got critiques from the teacher fellow and professors. Afterwards, they tweaked their presentations. The entire afternoon was filled with fun as students enjoyed their last class at COSMOS. There was drawing on the whiteboard, Just Dance on the projector, and games of Kahoot and Jeopardy.