Senior at the University of Southern Mississippi majoring in Computer Science. Expected to graduated in December 2019.

For the summer of 2019, I worked with Dr. Daniel Ritchie at Brown University. His broad research focus is in the intersection of computer graphics with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our project focused on training a (1) a large 3D dataset of furniture and movable parts that uses an active learning component to suggest annotations on similiar yet novel data (2) computer vision task which can take an incomplete point cloud representation of a scene and predict which parts of which objects in that scene can be interacted with and how they can move.



Week 1: June 3rd - 7th

Upon moving in and meeting my mentor as well as the research team, I was given an in-depth introduction to the current project and research efforts that have been developed over the past year. Also, learned that there was one week left to meet the International Conference on 3D Vision June 10th paper deadline. The gist of the project is that we further segment existing 3D models into individual components and provide an initial seed or batch of manual kinematic annotations which are then used in conjunction with Geometric Sampling and shallow Machine Learning algorithms to suggest possible new kinematic annotations. In conjunction with my first week in the lab, I had several social events to attend for another summer program that I am apart of at Brown. Thus far, I am enjoying my time here and look forward to the weeks to come.


Here's an aerial view of Providence, RI

Week 2: June 10th - 14th

The entire research team worked through the weekend to meet the deadline for 3DV. It was rather intense yet rewarding at the same time. I feel more comfortable communicating with my mentor and others in the lab. Once we met our deadline, my mentor let us rest and take it easy for the next few days. We convened later in the week to discuss action items to polish our current work and also met with a PhD student from another lab to discuss a potential collaboration with his work and our current dataset. Although things have slowed down, between reviewing literature suggest by mentor as well as the PhD student and action items there is still plenty to do. I am beyond pleased to be apart of this lab and learn from everyone here.

Rhode Island School of Design's Muesem

Week 3: June 17th - 21st

This week was a rather different shift since all the PI’s were attending CVPR. Our group still conducting our weekly meeting and continued with wrap up work on evaluations and next steps of our publication. There was also a new member, fellow undergraduate, in the lab for the summer. I and another member spent some time helping the new member get caught up to speed.


Vegan Icecream from Like No Udder

Week 4: June 24th - 28th

First full week without any PIs, they all were on vacation. I become a little anxious and felt a little lost when thinking about what would make the most since to take on next. With some helpful advice from a grad student began reading related literature in hopes to formulate a problem statement to dicuss with my mentor upon his return


Kimchi Tofu Stew from Soban 소반

Week 5: July 1st - 5th

This week marked the second week of all the PIs being away on vacation. I took this opportunity to change scenary and spent a week working remotely in Toronto. The isolated and new environment gave me the ability to focus rigorously on reading and formalizing my notes into a draft problem statement. I also continued working on our stk codebase, mainly focusing on evaluations. I also spent a few hours helping a PhD student annotate some last minute data for a deadline.


Happy Canada Day from Toronto, Ontario

Week 6: July 8th - 12th

Quite a bit has happened this week. Firstly, I finalized formalizing my notes and ideas into a draft problem statement. My mentor advised me to be less exhaustive in my writing (e.g citing anything tangentially relevant), and also be more thoughtful in the overall narrative that I convey. Taking him up on his advice, I took advantage of the writing center and prepared for our meeting with a Ph.D. collaborator the following day. With a more refined problem statement/outline, I was able to more effectively convey my ideas across allowing us to move forward with conducting meaningful research. Being that my time here is nearing an end, we also discussed how to best utilize the time as well as the resources we have available. We agreed that due to the conflicting time frame and the potential opportunity to present at a more focused venue with more polished contributions, I will not be participating in the two undergraduate summer research symposiums that take place at Brown.


Daniel and I having a serious conversation

Week 7: July 15th - 19th

Being the first week of my actual project, I dedicated the bulk of my time to getting an initial pipeline set up. Spent quite a bit of time coding together a set of scripts to leverage existing libraries as well as our stk codebase. To my delight this gave me the opportunity to become one with the data and understand the pipeline. Our first formal meeting on this project raised question and a series of initial assumptions to keep in mind. Also to my dismay, I often have a bad habit of sticking my foot in my mouth when explaining my research. So these days I am getting much practice at communicating my ideas.


BLOKUS! … My teammate carried me.

Week 8: July 22nd - 26th

I failed to mention but I am also in another summer program here at Brown, the Leadership Alliance to be exact. As such we traveled and presented at a National Symposium in Hartford, CT. As one of the only computer science students in this program, I was not looking forward to this. I gave an initial presentation with very basic power point slides to my grad student mentor and it did not go well. Thankfully she had a series of tips and advice on presenting. Structurally, my presentation needed a few tweaks but it terms of visuals, engaging the audience outside my discipline and pacing I had much work to do. I had the chance to get in another practice session the night before with a few friends and add the finishing gifs to my presentation the day of. To my surprise many people enjoying and appreciated my high level yet engaging presentation.


The face of someone with an reoccurring wedgie.

Week 9: July 29th - Aug 2nd

This week marks the end of the Leadership Alliance program here at Brown and it shows for my schedule has been inconsistent with events, deadlines and various other social gatherings. There was another venue we had to give a presentation at and to my dismay it was a poster session. This boiled down to me ignoring my presentation obligations and spending the bulk of my down time doing actual research. This went fine until the night before were, my employed adhoc strategy of spending 20 minutes between work blocks completing my poster yielded little progress. Further complicating things, as I usual do, I decided to use Adobe Illustrator which I am new to. This resulted in me staying up all night to finish the poster and printing it out the morning of the session.


The finest Baklava in Providence

Week 10: Aug 5th - 9th

My last in final week in Providence, things went in a similar manner as the previous two weeks. Rather busy handling logistics, meetings and social gatherings. This does not bother me as my PI and I have agreed to continue work on both projects when I return home. Looking back, I can confidently say that this city has yet to grow on me. However, the people that I have meet here have been and have had the pleasure of working with or attending church have left a great impression. Words cannot express the gratitude that I have for my mentor, staff at Brown, as well as individual who support the Leadership Alliance and CRW-A DREU programs for this insightful, unpredictable and cultivating summer experience.


So long Providence