Week 5

HALFWAY DONE!! This week I focussed on working on my poster and abstract. As my deadline for the extended abstract comes closer (July 10) I am spending more time on writing the abstract. It is definitely not easy to write an abstract, I do not have any prior experience in writing such scientific papers, hence this is a very challenging process. Finding relevant background and scholarly publications is difficult given the mass volume of papers at my disposal. Thankfully, my mentors helped me a lot. Jodi found me a conference whose papers dealt with work similar to mine, so I had to go through 120 papers published in that conference from 2014-2023 manually to narrow down 3 relevant papers for my use. Another important thing was understanding what kind of visualizations I should add. As I do not have any experimental results, it is hard to come up with statistical visualizations. I ended up creating flow charts and diagrams for my data pipeline and applications. I also conducted interviews with lab members as part of my requirement analysis to better understand applications for my pipeline. My mentors are both travelling in the coming week which means their availability to give feedback for my work will reduce, so I need to finish important work earlier, according to their schedules, which can be a little hectic. One good news was that I finally received my first stipend from Milestone 1, the payment came a lot later than I expected. It should have come by June 15 but did not come before June 27. The weekend was not very exciting because there were thunderstorms happening. I did go to a nice park and a cafe with my friend.