I am completely new to geospatial data and machine learning, so a significant part of my research process is going to be learning about these and how to work with them in python. This first week I completely focussed on understanding what geospatial data is and how it is represented. I truly believe that the best way to understand something well is to try and teach it. Lucky for me, I have a group of people (mentioned in week 4 blog) who are interested in listening to what I have been learning, so I made a presentation to explain geospatial data and essential spatial information required while working with it.
My biggest struggle this week was learning to stay on task for 8 hours a day while I was alone at a desk. I decided to reduce the amount of headspace that I spend on wrestling with myself by introducing some external accountability beyond that from my research advisor as he is pretty hands-off. So, I proposed making a secondary research team of sorts with other students involved in the DREU 2021 program such that we have:
- Daily scrum style meetings where we discuss goals for the day. This would also help us learn about each others research and get acquainted with various fields of research in computing
- A virtual office space like in gather.town for interested folks to work together
- Evening happy hours/ reflections
Look at next week’s blog for more updates on my research and on my efforts to make that research happen!