Research Experience
Level: Silver
My proposed research experience was to work in Dr. Sanjay Purushotham’s lab during the Fall and Spring 200. The topics of research that were completed were applied deep learning, machine learning, and data science to health informatics. I put in a minimum of 10 hours per week in the lab conducting research related to health informatics. This will amount to around 120 plus hours in total.
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During the fall my main task was designing a web portal to display various research results of Dr. Purushotham's lab. This was great exposure into the health informatics research, and allowed me to work with many of the PhD students in that lab. That project was a success, and I enjoyed working with the team so much that I returned in the spring. The spring was more focused of machine learning and deep learning research. The main research that I completed was on VQA models analyzing images and answering questions about them. As we can see from the images on the right I got to showcase this on the web portal that I created. This concept of models predicting answers to various questions is very powerful. The goal is to get these models to a point where they are capable of more efficiently predicting important entities on the images, and to potentially catch anything that could fall through the cracks. This concept could help save lives, and make health care professional's jobs easier.
This experience contributed to the teamwork learning objective. This is because I was able to join a team of researchers working with Dr. Purushotham. For all of the projects that I worked on I was able to work with diverse teams of PhD and masters students. It also contributed towards persistence. This is because the main topics of deep learning, machine learning, and data science are all very difficult to learn and apply. I had to spend many hours trying to understand various different topics and I still am not anywhere close to being an expert! However, there is always something new to be learned and I will always be hungry for knowledge
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Overall, this is the experience that I am most proud of. I had no idea what it meant to be apart of a research team before this experience. I found out how important it is to be apart of a group with a common goal in mind. I learned how to write reports on my findings and how to take constructive criticism on said findings. The most important take away for me is that I've formed lifelong connections with other researchers. This experience has helped me grow as a person, in addition to helping me grow my network. Because of this experience, I hope that I will be able to work in a research lab at some point in my career.
Additional Learning objectives
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One learning objective that this experience helped contribute towards was be accepting constructive criticism and knowing when to give feedback. By having a mentor like Dr. Purushotham I received plenty of constructive criticism due to my lack of experience and his plethora of knowledge. I was also able to feel out when the right and wrong times to give feedback to my team was.
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Another learning objective that this experience contributed towards was the ability to recognize and validate data. This is because the entire research experience, and health informatics in general, is based on the analysis of data. By the end of the experience I was able to tell the difference between good and bad data.
Core Learning objectives
Express ideas in an organized, clear, concise, and accurate manner.
This experience contributed to expressing my ideas in an organized, clear, concise, and accurate manor because I had to contribute my perspectives and findings to the rest of my team. I wanted to be heard so I had to express my ideas concisely and accurately.
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Write clearly and effectively.
This experience trained my writing skills. This is because I had to compile weekly reports to report my findings. I had to write clearly and concisely if I wanted my research to be taken seriously.
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Effectively connect multiple ideas and approaches.
My research in health informatics contributed to this learning objective because the field of health informatics is composed of many interdisciplinary fields. In order to create acceptable research I needed to connect multiple ideas and many different approaches in order to bridge all of the fields involved.
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Formulate questions and hypotheses within the discipline.
This experience contributed to this learning objective because In order to conduct research I needed a direction to start in. By forming a hypothesis, I was able to better formulate my thoughts and maintain structure
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Understand how practitioners think within the discipline and view the world around them.
I worked very closely with Dr. Purushotham so I was able to see how he thinks and acts. This was a very good experience because I was able to dissect and learn from how a professional in the field approached their work.
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Predict, recognize, and weigh the risks and benefits of the project for others.
This research experience contributed to this learning objective by giving me the opportunity to see how my research outcome can affect those who receive it. I was able to see various pros and cons of using VQA models in predictive health care.
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