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.