This has been the best summer yet. Not only because of the experience and memories but also because of the amount I got to learn over the past eight weeks.

First off, the project has been a success. I got above what I aimed for at the start of the internship. This past Thursday, I presented my project to a crowd of around 70 people at Harvard Law. People loved the fusion of art history and technology and I received really good feedback on it. There are two aspects of the project that make me happy. One being that not only I was able to make a terminal-based version of my project but also host the entire thing online using Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Second aspect relates much more to the art side, I was able to make predictions about any input image and render which lesser-known artist might have painted that. In this manner, it serves as an art exploratory tool for not only myself, but for every art enthusiast out there. Here is my project, curate: http://curate-env.pwfuqy2wzu.us-west-2.elasticbeanstalk.com/. As I have had some issues with AWS when updating my application, I get new URL every time I update my application. This get out-dated sometime soon if I update my application but the latest link will always be available from ‘About’ page of the website. The slides I used for the presentation are hosted here: bit.ly/curate-slides

Apart from the amazing internship project, I had a great experience because of my two fellow interns: Michelle and Julian (and they too made some really good projects). I also had a great weekend trip to NYC, where I went to MoMA and Guggenheim, the latter turned out to be the best art museum visit I have ever made. Capping off things I learned this summer, I was able to learn to restart my reading habit and complete The President is Missing, Another Country (Baldwin), Man’s Search for Meaning, and When Breath Becomes Air. I plan to finish The Glass Castle and We Should All be Feminists before the end of my internship. I also made my initial steps into world of cooking and learned to make wide array of sandwiches (including NYC inspired Bagel ones) and burritos, a massive shout-out to Michelle and Julian for the motivation and help. Among other things, I got my hair colored and received diverse set of reviews on them and got thrown popcorn at during Red Sox game because of cheering for Mariners. I am also back on twitter @satvik_sh

Big thanks to everyone at Library Innovation Lab for the help and feedback on curate.

Looking forward to the last couple of weeks and then heading back to India for a month worth of family, food, friends, and adventures.

Hi everyone! I am back to blogging again on the usual 2-week mark.

The last couple of weeks stand in sharp contrast to my past two years at the UW. In addition to working on the project, I have spent some great time exploring Boston and Cambridge with two great fellow interns. I have made good progress in my project of identifying art movements using keras and ResNet50 architecture but now I am at a halt because of lack of resources, something that I am trying to find a way around. I really like the way Library Innovation Lab provides the freedom for interns, which helps us in coming up with meaningful projects, based on themes/concepts that matter to us. It is something so different from a generic internship experience and something that would not have been possible without the wonderful team of people working at LIL.
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Moving on from that, I have been able to pick up reading once again and managed to finish up a book in record time (two weeks), The President is Missing. It was a really good read, especially when I had been away from fiction for a long time. I have taken up When Breath Becomes Air now and have managed to complete half of it within a couple of days. I am really looking forward to setting another record time and having a summer full of interesting reads. Just completed watching Sterling K. Brown’s commencement speech at Stanford which touched upon some great points – I might be partial on this one because of philosophical references he evoked in his speech.

I await the more wonderful opportunities and experiences this summer has to offer and to grow as an individual each day, not by just learning to code better but by improving as a person overall, and I believe that reading plays a big role in that.

Until next time.
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(Cheering for Mariners instead of Red Sox at Fenway Park turned out to be interesting)

Hi everyone! Sorry for the huge delay in the post but UDub had me on the edge for the past couple of months.

Finally, I am in Boston and had a wonderful first day at the Library Innovation Lab at the HLS. The past quarter was quite crazy because of the 4 high-level classes I took but I feel happy that I managed to get through all that with good grades. Sleep of 5 hours each night wasn’t enough but the past quarter pushed me to a level I did not expect I would be able to work on. In addition to all the cool classes, the main highlight was meeting with the CEO of Kernel Labs, a startup accelerator and fixing a date to host def hacks() at their office this coming Fall. I look forward to being the head organizer for the event and making sure of its successful nature. Regarding the classroom part, I got exposed to many ML algorithms, which was one of the best classes I have taken at the UW. I look forward to using many of those algorithms in my future projects.
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At LIL, I plan to work on an art based ML and Computer Vision project (yes, I am back w/ another art based project). For the first part, I plan on using CNN (possibly w/ ResNet and keras) for artwork identification and the second stage would include using Vision to do Neural Style Transfer. Although I have not taken a class in CV, I am excited by the idea my project is centered around and look forward to learning a lot of new things over the course of this project. Apart from that, I really want to explore the great area of Boston and Cambridge to the fullest while I am here and discover all the best food places.
That is, it for the short update but I will make sure to keep you updated about the progress I make on the project and my findings of Boston/Cambridge. Looking forward to working with a great people over at the LIL in addition to a couple of great LILterns.

Super-excited about the World Cup and currently reading The President is Missing.

Hi everyone!

This quarter has been really rough but I am liking it too. Although the classes are of higher level than any I had taken before, but the topics of DS and ML offer problems that are really interesting to work on. For example, only in the first week of the quarter, I got the chance to implement KNN classification and understand the concepts lying underneath it.

Apart from that, I attended SWEHacks last weekend and won the Best in Show prize for an awesome project that my team worked on. We used Github’s API, IBM Watson, and bokeh in python to fully implement our project in an 10-hour hackathon, something that I was elated about. Here is the Github repo for the same: SWEHacks. Also, as the prize each member on the team won ticket to the Geekwire Summit and I am really excited to attend and be a part of that event.

This Saturday, I also clocked in the hours for my first on-campus paid job which had me helping on and tutor students in calculus and pre-calculus topics and problems. It was refreshing to switch back to calculus concepts after multiple quarters of linear algebra and numerical analysis. Hoping for everyone to have a nice couple of weeks ahead.

A few articles: Hong Kong's missing booksellers, Cold War around Data, and The traits of Problem-solving teams.