Week 6- 28 June 2024

This week went by really fast. I worked on developing ideas for my individual project. I knew I wanted to do policy shaping so I was reading related papers and trying to come up with ideas that I could implement for the next 5 weeks. I came up with 9 ideas and presented them to Elaine. We went through each idea and picked one that she said is novel and also doable for the rest of 5 weeks. My work involved the extension of this paper which basically allows a robot to learn using policy shaping even when the human is not paying attention to it all the time. Therefore, this is modified policy shaping. I had to first implement the paper’s algorithm and then come up with ideas on improving their work. By the end of the week, with the help of the graduate students in the lab, I was able to successfully implement the paper. I also had the other summer course classes to attend and was doing their homeworks as well. Their main assignment is the research proposal whose first draft I had to do this week as well. I am excited about improving the paper’s work and playing around with how I can implement my ideas on their algorithm.