Machine Learning Intern Journal — New Ways Of Working
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.
Last week we moved one step closer to finalising our fault detection project, and more importantly, we celebrated the 3rd birthday of DAI, our dancing robot. Since there were no major breakthroughs this week, I’ll instead discuss my opinions on the new ways of working and how our Foundation is not afraid of experimenting with these.
Our fault detection project for a client of our aiXlr8 program is (finally) coming to its end. The past few weeks have been rewarding at times (I had missed the feeling of writing long scripts and debugging them for hours), but also a lot of frustration over stagnant results. We are dealing with a very complex problem, with very little data. It is very far from the neat Cat or Dog datasets we worked with in our University degree. The real world is messy, and this project is no exception. Having spent many days trying all sorts of different techniques to exploit our dataset to its limits, we have hit a plateau in performance. We have, however, been able to demonstrate that our network can learn useful information to differentiate between defective and non-defective drill heads, but not enough with the amount of data we have currently.
On a more festive note, we celebrated DAI’s 3rd birthday. It gave us a little performance and we even let it out of its restricting bounding box so that it could explore a bigger surface. It was the first time I saw it properly navigate an open space and it was very interesting to see its movement choices.
Finally, I’d like to talk a bit about the new ways of working. We are living in uncertain times, that require dynamic and adaptive behaviour. More than ever, people around the world are being encouraged to work from home (WFH), which inevitably leads to a very different work dynamic. Our Foundation was practicing WFH well before the pandemic hit, since many of our collaborators work part-time. We have access to a co-working space in Geneva, a minute away from the train station which makes is very practical to pop in and out. As everything in this world, there are pros and cons to WFH, and I’ll do my best to lay them out. Disclaimer, however, that I will be discussing my personal experience based on my own situation, and that I am conscious that while these work arrangements are convenient for the privileged, they can be disadvantageous to others. This is more to serve as a conversation starter and a way for the Foundation to reflect on its work arrangements, rather than an extensive research on the global advantages and disadvantages of WFH.
Let’s start with the advantages. Clearly, WFH allows for a certain comfort by eliminating your commute, and more importantly your dress code. At our Foundation, productivity is the real measure of work done. This is applied in several ways. First of all, a normal full time job (in Switzerland) is considered to be 40 hours a week (8 hours a day), but here our full time is 32.5 hours a week (6.5 hours a day). The expected trade off is that by reducing the number of hours, we increase our productivity in the shorter work day. I have to say that personally, I believe this technique works well. Since I ‘only’ work 6.5 hours a day, I am very strict about getting the most out of the day, and deflect distractions more easily. Furthermore, we are given complete flexibility over how and when we place those hours. My internship is at 60%, so I work 19.5 hours a week. I can decide what days to work and for how long. Recently, I was up in the mountains with some friends. One day we decided to go on a long hike, so I decided to take the day off and catch up on the hours the following days. If you are busy in the morning, you can work late into the evening. This again has been a really great way for me to work, as I am working on many different projects and love the outdoors. I can therefore use the flexible hours to decide when and where I want to work, and that truly is a luxury.
These arrangements work well for me, but they may not work for everyone. Some people require more structure, available through the more traditional workspace and hours. Furthermore, only working from home may create a feeling of isolation and distance from your colleagues, which can be detrimental to the work being done. That is why I believe a balance between WFH and office working is important for optimal working conditions.
The Foundation is looking at implementing a new (dare I say ‘radical’) feature to its already progressive approach to ways of working. Starting next year, they want to experiment with the inclusion of 1 hour a day dedicated to sport/meditation/yoga. This means that our 6.5 work day would be 5.5 hours of work + 1 hour for ‘wellbeing’ (let’s call it that from now on). As an active person, this is the most wonderful news. Getting paid to run, play tennis, climb, meditate, or work on my flexibility? Paradise! I think anyone reading this also has a little red light flashing in the back of their mind. How can one efficiently monitor this to avoid abuse? With our Foundation focusing on a WFH culture, how can we avoid workers pretending to use this hour for wellbeing? Where do we draw the boundary of ‘wellbeing’? Is reading considered meditation? What if watching cute kitten videos on YouTube helps me reduce my stress and anxiety? How do we monitor people’s wellbeing without being invasive or controlling? Many questions, with many answers.
I just thought of a potential work around. Instead of paying the employee the regular hourly wage, we could instead find alternative ways of paying them. Off the top of my head, this could be for example paying for their membership at a fitness gym, a climbing gym, but also a yoga or mediation course, or for Headspace for example. It could go even further, and pay for equipment, for example new running shoes or a climbing harness, or a yoga ball or mat — or a comfortable meditation chair. Basically, the challenge is to have the advantage of actually working on your wellbeing be greater than the advantage of abusing the system. There are myriad other ways to do this, by providing internal meditation or yoga classes for example. However, this requires appropriate facilities.
What do you think about the inclusion of an hour in the work day dedicated to wellbeing? Any suggestions on how to avoid abuse?
