After completing your IRB, how is your project both globally and locally significant? What was your process of coming up with a significant study? Why is it important to you?(Be specific with your project)
My project is globally significant because marine ecosystems face threats such as pollution, climate change, and overfishing, and marine researchers need to analyze large amounts of underwater footage to monitor species. Improved detection with AI can increase efficiency of conservation efforts. My project is locally significant because Taiwan's waters contain a diverse amount of marine life that requires consistent monitoring, meaning that accurate detection tools can assist scientists to track species and study reef conditions. The idea for this study came from my article evaluation presentation where I talked about how machine learning is used in marine biology. This topic is important to me because I want to see where AI will be going in the future and it's impacts on marine biology.
How are you ensuring you study is ethical? How did you learn about what makes a study ethical, and how did you apply that to your specific study? Why is maintaining ethics important, and how will it make your study better?(Be specific with your project)
I will ensure my study is ethical by making sure that my human participants give informed consent to be in my experiment, know they can withdraw at any time, and will remain anonymous in my experiment. I will also use video footage responsibly without harming animals. I learnt that you should minimize harm for your participants, make sure they give informed consent to be in the study, and make sure they know they can withdraw without any penalty. Maintaining ethics is important to protect the rights, dignity, and safety of participants. This will ensure that my findings are valid and legitimate.
Describe how your method aligns with your research question, evaluate how aligned you think it is at this stage, and articulate how you learned about best practices for alignment.
My method aligns with my research question (Can an artificial intelligence automatically detect marine animals in underwater video footage as accurately as a human observer?) by comparing AI with humans under identical conditions. I think that my method is almost perfectly aligned to my research question, just needing some small tweaks such as adding some rules about what a "correct" detection means or some rules when watching the videos. I learnt that to align my methods to my research question, I need to make sure that all the components of my study are all working to achieve the research objective. I also need to make sure that my research is feasible for the resources I have available.
What questions on the IRB do you think will be most helpful in drafting your methods section (which we will start Monday)? Why will these be helpful?
Provide in detail, the procedure in which you plan to collect data. This was helpful because it helped me think through the process I want to take for completing this project and allowed me to take in how much time each step would take to ready up.
How did feedback from your peers or others help you grow during the completion of this assignment?
Over the course of writing each section of the paper, I was able to receive feedback from my peers and my teacher, all of which greatly helped in moving my paper forward. I feel like being able to ask someone, "Hey, how does this look?" can greatly improve any piece of work because I'm acquiring another perspective that can help point out mistakes or help rephrase sections of my writing.
How have you grown in your work/study habits in this assignment? How do you plan to grow in this area moving forward?
I had a really hard time starting on the actual research part of this assignment. I just kept putting it off and saying, "Oh, I'll do it later". Then it came to the day when we had to start writing the results section, and I barely had anything done. I should really start making a to-do list or a calendar to plan when I'm going to do my work. I've been trying to get things done as early as possible, and it's really helping me enjoy my free time more instead of stressing about homework assignments I still need to do.
How does this assignment connect to other work you've done in non-English classes? Particularly PBL?
This assignment has helped me improve in the professional side of writing and in being able to use the feedback I receive efficiently. This especially helps in PBL, as I was the main writer for our magazine, requiring me to be able to write as professionally as possible while taking feedback from my groupmates to add their ideas into the magazine. This also connects to intro to natural sciences, as there are a few assignments requiring essays of different complexities explaining science concepts. This is really similar to the research paper I've been writing because they usually require tons of research before actually being able to start writing them.
In what ways will this assignment connect to future classes and life after high school?
I expect myself to be required to write multiple more research papers in the future, and this was a really good starting ground on how long they take and how much effort they require. Despite probably only writing half the length of what a full research paper should be, I enjoyed the experience, and I think it has really improved my writing and researching skills. Along with the research paper, we did a ton of different activities that also taught me different techniques for researching and building sections for a research paper.