Machine Learning Intern Journal — Writer’s Block

As the title indicates, this is the journal of a Machine Learning (ML) intern at the impactIA Foundation. I’ll be attempting to keep a weekly journal of my activities in the Foundation to keep track of my progress and leave a roadmap for the interns who come after me.

This week’s blog is going to be a short one, last week was a slow one with not much worth relaying. I think it was inevitable that this day would come. After 9 weeks of productive blog writing, I’ve hit a bit of a writer’s block. Although, the slow week may be the culprit.

One little victory from last week, I have begun forming a habit of creating scripts for everything — I know, how can I be a three year old computer scientist and only now begin to write scripts? I’ll blame it on the Cognitive Science strand of my Bachelor’s degree. While my CompSci peers were learning about bash, git, terminal programming and all these essentials for a Computer Scientist, I was busy learning about the brain. I therefore missed a lot of foundational knowledge in Computer Science. Working at impactIA has been valuable in many aspects, one of them being my forced confrontation with my lack of foundations in this domain, and the opportunity to quickly learn and integrate it into my workflow. In my 11 weeks at the Foundation so far, I have managed to start building solid foundations in areas that I was previously lacking, and this has been very rewarding. This internship has already boosted my employability skills and my confidence in applying my knowledge to real-world problems, having only recently emerged from the sanitised environment of a university degree.

That’s all for now! We are hoping to finish our current quality control aiXlr8 program to (finally) move onto new and exciting projects!