IITH Internship Diary - Week 2 : Troublesome Implementation

Week 2 passed by like a flash with nothing much done from my side. And if this continues on, I guess I would have achieved at the end of my internship.

On Monday, I met my PhD mentor Aarghya sir, and he made a lot of basics clear, and also made me understand the basics of research paper, and what actually I need to do on the implementation side. And it was followed by a short meet with Vineeth sir on Wednesday, with almost nothing done from my side in between these two meetings.

Then, I started with the basics of Lua, followed by that of Torch. I am currently reading and trying to understand ML implementation with Torch from these two sources.

• https://github.com/soumith/cvpr2015/blob/master/Deep%20Learning%20with%20Torch.ipynb
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160216003701/http://code.madbits.com/wiki/doku.php?id=tutorial_basics

On weekend, I went to visit Hyderabad, but due to such long commute to reach there, I probably won't be going anywhere in the city for the next few weeks. It was tiring.

For the next week, I would mainly continue with the above mentioned links and speed up my work with my main focus on this only, which I wasn't able to give for the past week.

IITH Internship Diary - Week 1 : Getting the basics slowly

Well, the week started with a meeting with my mentor professor Dr. Vineeth sir for the first time on Tuesday. I was really excited about it, and my excitement for the project and machine learning in general only increased after meeting. He is really an enthusiastic person to meet. He basically told all of the interns more about their work, and what all new things are happening in the field of ML.

After that day, I started with learning logistic regression from the Ng's course. But then switched on to learning the basics of neural networks from here. Michael Nielsen really made the concepts very clear in the first go! But somehow, it still took me around three days completing the first chapter only. Later I also saw his TED talk on open science.

I guess it took me three days because I was not having any feedback loop to tell myself what all I have achieved everyday. I have already included this thing in my list from now on, so things will hopefully speed up from now on.

On Saturday, I raced through the later end of the first chapter. I would come back to the implementation discussion that he did, later on.

Sunday was a day well spent, learning about LSTMs. Christopher Olah has a really awesome blog. You must definitely check that out. And later part of the day was spent reading research paper. Although only bits of the paper were clear, I was happy that atleast something was clear this second time.

Also, I somehow landed on some of the amazing pages on the web, and I have saved all those links and I am definitely gonna read all of them soon. I would share them as I go on reading them one by one!

Bye!

IITH Internship Diary - Week 0 : Health Problems

Week 0 is nothing, but about the week just before I arrived at IIT Hyderabad.

And I wish I had some title other that than "Health Problems". But this is the truth, the hard one.

Although in the past few weeks, I learnt the basics of regression, and gradient descent, and also watched a video on neural networks, this was far less than satisfactory.

I hope the next diary entries will be mostly related to my first research experience and not something stupid like this.

My health took a toll around two weeks back which started as normal fever, but then turned into heat fever causing a lot of weakness. And the best was yet to came, and it was the great grand eye infection that brought tears to my eyes for no reason.

Also I had some strange feeling when I first arrived here. I wrote more about it here : http://thisisashwanipandey.blogspot.in/2016/05/strange-feeling-of-loneliness-at-iith.html

Thankfully things are back to normal now. And there are a lot of mountains to climb.

Bye!

Strange feeling of loneliness at IITH

Yesterday when I arrived at IIT Hyderabad, a strange feeling crossed my body, and to tell you the truth it was very strange and horrible.

I am writing this post to make myself understand what actually happened.

So what actually happened? What made me feel like I should go back to my home as soon as possible?

Actually my room-mate who is from NIT Trichy went to the city, so there was no one in the room. And even when he was there, he was talking to his other friend in Telugu, and most of the people here communicate in their native language only when talking among themselves. Obvious, it is.

Then, the sweeper lady knew only Telugu, and it was a hard moment making her understand what I want to say.

But this language barrier couldn't bring all this strange feelings. Let me see what else happened.

In the morning, I had a meeting with an M.Tech student, who made me question my decision of coming here for research internship. He asked me what I know in Machine Learning already, and what sort of project and research work I would be doing. And I was completely blank.

I guess this was one trigger.

Then, in the afternoon, I wasn't feeling very well. I had eye infection a few days back, and I guess the eye drops that the doctor prescribed has taken a toll on my eye sight. It was a lot blurry yesterday, although it's better now.

I guess these two things mainly triggered the fear.

I couldn't do anything after that. So, I went to sleep after that. But alas, the heat and the lack of mattress didn't allow that. I was all sweating when I woke up.

Thankfully, things seemed normal by evening.

But all this has made me realize the importance of why human form relationships. Maybe we do so evolutionary, because it suppress the fear of the unknown, that there would be someone if something bad happens. We start enjoying our time with the people, and so the fear hides insides.

But remember, it's not gone. It's there. I just got to see a sight of that and it was horrifying.

It was the fear of the unknown that troubled me yesterday.

But, what can be done for that? I don't know right now. It came and went by. I hope my future would have the answer for the same.