What I Made During My 2 Years at Harvard MDE Program (3/3)
Students dedicate their second year of MDE to a thesis project called Independent Design Engineering Project (a.k.a IDEP). This course intends to apply what students have learned in studio and frameworks during the first year.
AI and Mental Health (MAS.S60)
Before beginning my IDEP, I’d like to mention another project I did for a class called MAS.S60 at the MIT Media Lab, which had significant meaning for me. Taught by Prof. Rosalind Picard et al. from the Affective Computing Group, this class has given me the training to conduct academic research and how to develop a project appropriately, and became a good basis for me to work on my IDEP later.
Roughly speaking, affective computing is a domain within computer science to understand human emotion and mental health through the use of computers. In this class, in the realm of affective computing, students worked on developing a project that would further understand human emotion and mental health better by leveraging artificial intelligence.
The project I worked on during this class won the iF Design Talent Award later on.
Just like when I won the A’ Design Award and Competition, it was great to have the output go beyond the classroom setting.
Independent Design Engineering Project I (ADV9381)
The thesis project at MDE is broken down into two semesters. During the Fall semester of the second year, students engage in rigorous research. In the Spring semester of the second year, students then proceed to build a prototype and user-test that, supported by sound research.
While in the MDE program, the ultimate concern for the students is what to do with the thesis project. Some come into the program with a specific topic in mind, while others have many ideas and themes changing by taking courses at Harvard.
For me, I always had in my mind to work on something that relates to the theme of AI and creativity. It was something I mentioned during my interview for the Fulbright Scholarship program as well. To fulfill this idea, I have been taking classes in statistics, data, and data science, regardless of having no experience in the field. I was finally ready to tackle this idea to make it real.
Independent Design Engineering Project II (ADV9382)
Extending from the research I did in the previous semester; I leveraged all the skills I learned in my elective classes at Harvard: research skills I learned in MAS.S60, usage of R, and data analysis in GOV1005, and skills in machine learning from AC209A and CS109B.
I consolidated all the skills above, I designed, implemented, and user-tested my thesis project. I’m sure there are still questions to be asked and needs more work in the future, but I’d like to understand my thesis project as the first step to deepen my research goals further.
Two years at Harvard MDE now seems like a blink of an eye, but I believe all the classes I’ve taken here has contributed to achieving what I had in my mind since the beginning of my graduate school experience, and I am content.
