Brando Blog

Working on Holiday

This Thanksgiving weekend has felt like an eventful trip. As my group and I planned out our v0.0.2 assignment, I realized that I was going to have another big assignment due right before it. On top of that, I was travelling home for the holidays and didn’t have a ton of time to pour into school since I was spending time with family. All of these factors forced me to come up with a plan to figure out how I can get everything done efficiently and still have free time for the holidays.

My biggest worry was my Operating Systems course which is formatted in a very sparser manner. Throughout the course, we only had five quizzes, one final project, one final report, and a final exam. Until now, I had only done the quizzes without giving the end of the course much thought. Recently, when the fourth quiz forced me to take a syllabus quiz, I realized how underprepared I was for the final project and report.

I was able to come up with a quick solution to lessen my workload for that class by recognizing the option for collaborators. I found another student who had not found a group yet and we were able to quickly make a plan to get the first section of our projects done in time. Through this experience, I learned how useful and important group learning and team work can be.

As I was going through that whole process of finding a team, I was able to come up with a plan to get my work done for my Capstone project as well. This week, I was the Scrum Master, meaning that I had to compile all of our work and do the final submission. This means that I had a very important task and needed to make sure I had time to do it. As soon as I realized that I was going to struggle with time, I informed my team and gave them an exact timeline of when I would be able to work. This provided them with the necessary guidance to get me everything I would need for the submission on time.

Project Progress

As for the project itself, things went really well this week. The final product that we are looking for is becoming clearer and clearer. Despite all of the time constraints we had due to the holidays and other projects, everyone did their part and every aspect of the project was improved. After I expressed that I was going to have trouble with time, my group members all pitched in to help fill in the slideshow so that I wouldn’t have to spend too much time on it.

If you don’t know what our project is about, it is a Top-N Genre Classification Neural Network Application. We are designing a machine learning model that is able to listen to an audio file and give the user a list of genres associated with that audio with different “confidence scores” attached to them. We split the project into a few different sections: Dataset Acquisition, Audio Input Preprocessing, Traditional Neural Network Programming, and BlueSky Neural Network. My responsibility in this project is setting up the audio input pre-processing.

Over the first week of implementation, I did a lot of research on librosa, a Python library for audio processing. I used librosa to convert audio files into visual spectrograms to represent the audio in a way that the neural networks could understand. Unfortunately, the first implementation of the neural network was not able to use these spectrogram images but instead needed MFCC data in the form of a json file. Luckily, the team was able to quickly work together to make a MFCC generation script as well but we still wanted to find a use for the images..

This week, our traditional neural network team was able to set up a new neural network processor that is capable of using the spectrogram images. This left me with some work to do with the Dataset Acquisition team to optimize both of the generators. We communicated to come up with some ideas to make the generators run faster so we could deliver the dataset to the neural networks as soon as possible. I also made a few tweaks just so that the dataset team could use the interface of my generators easier and more flexibly. For example, the generators now automatically filter the directory down to only audio files and you are also able to input a directory at any location in your computer to gather and store them.

Conclusion

I learned many lessons over the course of this weekend:

• I learned that I need to plan ahead more often so I don’t end up in situations like this.
• I learned the importance of asking questions and working together with others.
• I learned how to communicate with others in a team environment to make plans and share ideas.

All of these lessons will be skills that I can carry with me throughout the rest of my academic career and my work-life moving forward. I realized that I can succeed in my work and school life while still leaving plenty of time for friends and family. All I need is thorough planning and foresight to make sure that I stay ahead on my responsibilities.

Introduction

Hello everybody, since my last blog post, I have decided upon my project and have almost begun the development phase! I have been working on creating a Top-N Genre Classification Neural Network. To be more specific, an AI machine learning model capable of classifying genres by receiving audio files and returning a list of genres with “confidence scores”. Music is a huge part of my life which is why I really wanted to find a project that matched my passion for the art. I am so glad that I am able to be a part of something I am excited for and passionate about.

Picking a Project

There were many projects to choose from and a lot of them looked intriguing to me. Particularly, I would have also enjoyed the other options centered around game design and/or music. The reason why this project was so appealing to me is because I have had the idea before! In my freshman year in 2022, I distinctly remember being very proud of my “formal proposal” assignment for my technical writing course. I proposed an AI machine learning model that can categorize music based on things like emotion and genre by finding its chord progressions, melodies, lyrics, etc. My current project is a lot simpler than this but maybe I can use what I learn to develop my initial idea!

Time Management

Balancing my work life, school work, friends, and family has been a bit of a struggle this term but I have found some great ways to manage it. I will break down some of my habits one topic at a time:

I started an internship over the summer and learned a lot about the Microsoft Power platform. I was able to provide so much efficiency to the department that they decided to keep me around over the school year! Over the course of this term, I have been trying to work around 20 hours a week in the mornings on weekdays. This has been plenty of time for me to continue making an impact on my department while also giving me plenty of time for other things. I think the best way I have been able to manage this is by holding myself to a set start time each day. I wake up every morning and log onto my work computer at 8. Depending on what projects my boss has for me to work on and what school work I need to finish afterwards, I clock out whenever it makes sense to.

Obviously this is not possible for everyone’s situation but I think there is some merit to deciding specific times to start working. In fact, I have started doing this with my school work too. In the past, I have spent many nights finishing assignments late due to poor planning and procrastination. Since I have started working, I have pretty much been forced to manage my time in order to not fall behind. I have basically dedicated the time I would have spent working when I was on full time to doing my school work. I have also dedicated certain days to specific assignments ahead of time giving me plenty of time to catch up if assignments take longer than I expect.

All of this planning and scheduling may make it seem as though I have no free time and I spend every waking moment working or studying. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth! Due to my dedication to planning during this term, I have had more time to hang out with my friends and roommates than I ever did over my last two years at OSU. I find that setting times and dates to complete assignments gives me a goal for that day and makes me work a lot faster and more focused. So, ironically, putting a little bit more time into planning has given me more freedom than I’ve ever had while in school.

Conclusion

This term has been very unique from the rest of my college career. My first internship, my capstone project, and living independently with five of my friends has been a big adjustment but also very rewarding. My internship has been super encouraging since it started out as being something I had never done before and turned me into one of the best in the field for the company. In this course, working with a group on a long-term project has definitely given me some stress but I am super excited about the project and am optimistic about my team. And finally, although my planning has helped, a big reason I have so much time to spend with my friends is because we all live together and can hang out any time! Overall, this term has been super fun for me and I am encouraged to keep moving throughout the rest of the school year. I have been branching out with new people and trying things that I wasn’t confident about before such as volleyball and playing more music! I am excited to continue down this path, learn many new things, and finish out the rest of my project.

Introduction

Hello everybody, my name is Brandon Nguyen. I am a third year computer science major here at OSU. I am currently living in Corvallis near campus but I have been taking a lot of online classes recently so I can have more freedom to travel between here and my home in Washington. Back home, I have two orange cats and two dogs (a big reason why I’ve been travelling home more frequently).

As far as hobbies go, I love to stay active. I try to work out and play as many different sports as I can. This past summer, I started to play a lot of volleyball. I would play nearly three to four times a week with some family-friends I recently connected with. I’m super bummed that the weather is starting to get gloomy but I’m excited to try out indoor volleyball and maybe some new activities.

While I spend a lot of time being active, I also love to be creative. My favorite art form being music. I started my music path with piano lessons when I was four years old. From then on I started to sing along to the car radio (I still love 2000-2010s pop) and interact with music every chance I got. I joined a dance studio when I turned seven and joined the middle choir in sixth grade. Choir was the one I stuck to the most. I even ended up being voted choir president in my senior year of high school!

Getting started with Computer Science

I started getting interested in computer science for many reasons that I ended up finding throughout my high school years. Like many in this field, I have been playing video games for all my life. I loved playing things like Skylanders and Minecraft as a kid and as I grew older I started wanting to make things like that myself. Throughout school, I always excelled in math and loved to challenge myself with strategy games and logic puzzles. When I got to high school and started getting my Associates degree through the Running Start program, I took a few computer classes and realized this is exactly what I had been training for my whole life! Many coding problems feel just like those puzzles to me and I have a lot of fun working things out.

As a Vietnamese Washingtonian interested in computer science, I really wanted to go to the University of Washington but I didn’t end up making it into their competitive computer science program. But I wasn’t too upset since I had been debating between UW and OSU since I had tons of friends that would be coming here with me. Once I got here and started taking real programming and software development classes, I only got more and more interested.

Moving forward with Computer Science

This past summer, I landed an internship with Washington Trust Bank where I work with a lot of Microsoft products to improve the processes in my sector of the bank. I had to learn Microsoft Excel and helped my team learn more about the Power platform with Automate and BI. I have been having a ton of fun learning something new on my own and being able to provide continuous improvements for my team and see their reactions. However, this is not exactly what I have in mind for my computer science career.

One worry I had regarding my computer science journey was how I am going to incorporate my creative interests into my career. As I started taking classes like networking and algorithms, sometimes I would get tired of the rigid structure of the material. But after looking through the projects options for my Senior Software Engineering Project course, I have a lot of hope for my future. All of the projects related to music and making games have brought my passion for computer science full circle. I am super excited for the year to come and I have regained a ton of confidence in my computer science decision.

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