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Week Five:
What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?
On the practical side, I have learned to work with a lot of different programs in new ways (including but not limited to Polaris, a library site; Raiser's Edge, a finance site; Adobe InDesign; YouTube; Instagram; and Blackbaud, a general organization site). I have also learned a lot about how a real nonprofit functions - it requires a lot of intercommunication to make sure things don't get done twice or not done at all. I have been working a lot with the head of Events, who is not technically my boss but who has been offering me a lot of advice on getting work done (do it early in case you make mistakes and have to go back!), on working in a library (the patrons come first, as do the donors) and on life in Paris in general (don't take the train after 11pm because they don't come as frequently). I think that her advice has taught me that leadership is very site-specific, and it can't really be taught; you just have to absorb knowledge from others and be willing to pass it on. There is no such thing as "general leadership skills" except being polite, patient, and a clear speaker.
Sounds like you learned a lot during the summer! Are there any other elements that stuck out to you about how the nonprofit environment differs from a research environment?
Week Four:
What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.
There haven't been specific challenges that I've encountered with my day to day work, but related to the content of my work, it has been extremely enlightening to fill in my knowledge gaps on the US criminal justice system. It's hard to learn all the ins and outs of it in two months, so I have tried to read books/articles on re-entry and court-related matters. Reading has been helpful and I've immediately learned a lot about the challenges of prison re-entry and the impact of judging on sentencing. I've also reached out to others that work here to learn about specific topics, which has helped a lot—talking to them has made it easier to digest the books/articles.
Week Five:
What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience? Have you met anyone who has been instrumental in shaping/helping you conduct your project? Briefly, how has this person impacted you? What have you learned about leadership from this individual, and how might it influence your actions, work, and self in the future?
I've learned a lot about criminal justice and the many actors involved, including the government, nonprofits, researchers, and more. My supervisor connected me with the Publisher of the Marshall Project, who I interviewed for WKCR 89.9FM. I have also been connected to other organizations in New York in the criminal justice space; I have been looking into tutoring for Petey Greene, a non-profit that helps incarcerated individuals. Though these are external actors/activities to my work, they are helping me learn about criminal justice and what it looks like in the real world.
It's really cool how you connected your Laidlaw work to your other pursuits, like your show on WKCR! Have you continued coverage of criminal justice issues on the show by interviewing other subject matter experts?
Week Three: What does a typical day look like this summer? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!
It's interesting because the last two days of the week were pretty atypical! Along with the rest of my research team, I took the red line down to MIT to attend this workshop on the computational complexity of statistical problems. The lectures were awesome––they have given me new motivation to tackle daunting theory problems, both in my current research and beyond. I happened to take one picture when I was there: it shows a slide with a list of open questions in fine-grained complexity. I would attach it but this interface does not seem to allow it.
In any case, a typical day in the summer involves waking up at around 8 or 9am and heading to the Joyce Cummings Center, which houses the Math and CS departments, as well as my office. There, I work with the three other members of my group. Most days, we meet with our advisor, and every week, we have a joint seminar with the rest of the program where we listen to a lecture or present our work. I like to take walks on campus during my breaks to clear my mind, but between the weeks of rain and the air pollution, I just wish the weather was nicer!
That sounds super interesting - was there a specific seminar that you attended that you found particularly insightful? And, how closely coupled were those seminars to your work - did they give you ideas for any new avenues of research to pursue?
Week Four:
What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.
I have had a pretty big problem with the language barrier - I can't really talk to people, so it is hard to make friends, and it is difficult if I'm lost. I had to deliver some messages for my work, and I got mega lost looking for the building where I was supposed to deliver the message. I couldn't read the street signs, and the two people I encountered (two men working for a moving company) could only speak French! I took Spanish in school, but that wasn't much useful... but I worked it out through a complicated series of hand gestures, a partially-working Google Translate app, and a lot of smiling and nodding. It was nice to feel a connection between these people and myself that overshadowed even the language barrier. I have also been teaching myself some short French phrases - just things like "where is the bathroom" and "can i have this, please?" The most useful one has been "Merci" or "Pardon" when I bump into someone on the train.
That must have been challenging - language barriers were something I thought a lot about when considering going abroad. Did you find it easier to manage later on in your project when you had spent more time in Paris?
Week Three:
What does a typical day look like this summer? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!
My typical day follows the conventional 9-5 work schedule. Throughout the day I have meetings with various professors and groups to touch base and go over my progress. Recently I've been put in touch with a professor at the University of Tokyo Main Campus, so I have been traveling there once a week to meet with him. I am also currently preparing a talk at Chiba University on gravitational wave physics.
Week Four:
What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.
The language barrier has been a challenge that I've had some difficulty surmounting. While I have been practicing my Japanese, it is not nearly at the level necessary to effectively communicate complicated ideas. Therefore, I've adjusted my approach to focus more on preparing materials for others to use and targeting groups that can speak English.
That must have been a great experience - what was the talk at Chiba University like?
Hi all! I have been working at the Justice Lab for the past three weeks and I'm enjoying my time there. Apologies for the late posts, but here are some responses to the past three weeks!
Week One:
Q: If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, has last summer’s project influenced your project this year, and if so how? If your project is different, what tools have you developed to help you work on this project?
A: My work this summer is different from my research last semester, which was an oral history on the Farmers' Protest. At the Justice Lab, I am working on the Square One project, which is a narrative change project on criminal justice reform in different states. For that, I have joined in on meetings on the work happening in Oklahoma, including some roundtables that brought together different stakeholders (business leaders, pastors, the mayor, etc) to discuss criminal justice reform. I have, however, continued my interest in oral history by editing transcripts of interviews conducted with roundtable participants. Overall, it's been exciting to learn about the different criminal justice initiatives at the Lab and helping wherever I can!
Week Two:
Q: If you are doing a leadership-in-action or community engagement project, how do you interact with community members, and what kind of conversations are you having? How do you connect with this community of people, and what common cause do you find?
A: I've really enjoyed having conversations about a wide variety of topics in criminal justice reform (CJR)—from solitary confinement, the Rikers prison, narrative change, and more—with people at the Lab and local leaders in Oklahoma. The common cause that binds everyone is a desire to reform the criminal justice system to make it more humane and less discriminatory. Becoming more involved in these conversations has been extremely educational for me because I am learning the nuances of the different parts of the criminal justice system. It has also sparked an interest in doing my own set of interviews with local re-entry organizations in New York for the radio station, merging my passion for radio with my interest in carceral reform.
Week Three:
Q: What does a typical day look like this summer? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!
A: I typically work in the office from 9am-5pm, though some stakeholder meetings in Oklahoma (held over Zoom) are in the evenings from 6-8pm. Each day, I compile a list of tasks I want to complete that day (cleaning transcripts, reading reports/books/research, etc) and get started. If there are any morning meetings with the Square One team, I look over the agenda and join them. Sometimes there are also meetings with members of the Lab throughout the day to learn about their projects that I attend. Other than that, for the rest of the day, I continue completing whichever tasks I have and update my team to continue our workflow. We also go on field trips sometimes! I have attached a photo of our group after attending a re-entry simulation at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which was extremely educational and valuable. We gained a better understanding of prisoners who are re-entering society and were placed in a simulation, which included doing tasks like visiting our probation officers, paying for transportation (we only had 3 public transport tickets), looking for employment, finding a place to sleep, etc. I didn't really understand how hard it is to re-enter society with no help until after physically completing the simulation. Though we look excited in the photo, it was quite sad to realize these challenges and hear from formerly incarcerated individuals on their experiences re-entering society after prison.
Photo link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Tyeci1j9kjZEDE6m9
That sounds very interesting - how did you get involved with the Square One project originally? Were there any issues that you focused on in particular over the course of the summer?
Apologies for the late post - I had to get my responses cleared beforehand which delayed my submission.
Week 1
Q: If your project this summer differs from your project last summer, has last summer’s project influenced your project this year, and if so how? If your project is different, what tools have you developed to help you work on this project?
A: Last summer, I worked on using computational and machine learning techniques to analyze both fMRI (brain imaging) and text data to contribute to a memory study. My project this summer is focused on helping make tools that can automate the process of triage, enabling first responders to respond to crises quicker and more effectively. While my research this year differs - I'm working with health-related data, and analyzing images and videos rather than text or MRIs - I'm using the same kind of quantitative and software engineering skills to develop algorithms and pipelines that can be used in a variety of contexts. Last summer was helpful for familiarizing myself with tools like Jupyter, working on a server, and using Linux/Bash alongside Python, all skills that I am using for my current project as well.
Week 2:
Q: If your project connects with your research from last summer, explain the ways in which it picks up on themes, issues, or questions that are important to you. How are you expanding on your project from last summer? How is your understanding of this topic evolving?
A: My project connects with some of the research I did last summer in terms of the techniques and processes that I am currently using. Part of my research last year involved using "foundation models" (very powerful, general purpose algorithms) to help with analyzing language; this summer, in order to help create technologies necessary for automated triage, I utilized other cutting-edge foundation models (such as Meta's Segment Anything model) that were attuned to image processing. My skills from last summer in creating analysis pipelines for applying pre-trained foundation models to new data (and understanding the steps of data preprocessing, code adaptation, etc) were crucial for this process.
I also have an evolving understanding of how triage works and what the constraints would be in a computational setting. Whereas there are many things a doctor can focus on immediately (measuring heart rate, note down injuries, etc) it is much harder for a robot to perform those tasks. There are workaround measures that are themselves areas of research (e.g., identifying heart rate from video of a person), but the process of working on this problem has provided me with a deeper understanding of what those second-order steps are.
Over these past two summers, I feel I have been exploring different types of knowledge - knowledge conveyed by text, by videos, by images, by time series data - and how we can analyze those types of knowledge in concert with each other to build new mental models and tools that can help build our understanding of the brain or help doctors treat patients.
Week 3
Q: What does a typical day look like this summer? Aside from a narrative description, upload a photo, video and/or other media submission!
A: The days tend to fluctuate a bit (especially depending on whether I'm in person or remote), but typically I wake up at 7, take the train and then a shuttle from DC to Laurel, MD, and start my workday. I'll work on my code, and attend meetings on the project. Often these meetings will give me a better picture of other areas of the project (for example, other types of triage approaches that are possible) and the overall topic. After lunch and some more work (interacting with some of the other interns as well), I'll head over to the makerspace to work on the intern project for our sector - essentially a separate project interns across teams can work on together. This year's intern project is making a small drone (like one you might buy on Amazon and fly) from scratch and programming it to fly autonomously. It's a super interesting project (involving hardware, software, and AI) and I've been learning a lot from it! After that, I'll head back home, grab dinner with a friend, and relax.
Here's a picture of the drone that we built (after a crash during a test run):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Qp2EnNTv89o3gVMX7
Week 4
Q: What challenges and/or difficulties have you encountered and how did you go about resolving them? Speak to a specific challenge you have encountered and some of the ways that you tackled the problem.
A: I've encountered a number of challenges trying to implement my project, due to my lack of familiarity with some of the techniques and approaches that we are using (related to computer vision) as well as my unfamiliarity with the general area of triage and first aid. I've tackled them both by consulting online guides and resources, which are abundant and very helpful, and also by talking to the employees I'm working with to see what they know about the issue and if they have any advice for approaching the problem.
One challenge I encountered was while I was working on my analyses. One type of image analysis is an image segmentation, where you highlight relevant areas of an image that you want to focus on (i.e., segment the area of focus). There are different algorithms that exist for performing these segmentations, where you give the algorithm some kind of "prompt" so it knows what to focus on. I was having issues with using one kind of prompt - a keypoint prompt - where you place dots on the rough areas that you want to focus on. This prompt was not granular enough, and selected elements that I did not want to select (for example, it would select a subject's whole body, instead of just their arm, because it couldn't tell that I was trying to select their arm and not their entire body). To resolve this issue, I talked with the other employees about it and had a one on one meeting with someone who was very experienced with using this type of model, who walked me through some of the alternative prompt methods we could explore. I ended up settling on a bounding box approach, where you draw a box around the desired area instead. This has the benefit of telling the model both what you want to select and what you do not want to select. In general, I have utilized and practiced a lot of my communication skills, which Laidlaw has emphasized throughout my two summers.
Week 5
Q: What new skills and/or knowledge have you gained from your summer experience?
A: I have gained a lot of skills and knowledge from this summer. As mentioned in some of my prior reflections, I gained technical skills, such as performing new types of analyses and generating new software workflows that combine analyses together to automate long and repetitive processes. I also gained technical knowledge, such as how cutting-edge image analysis (computer vision) algorithms work, as well as learning about the different considerations that go into triage and first aid response, especially in disaster situations. Lastly, I exercised and gained soft skills, such as collaboration and communication. Working on a project with a larger team meant working with several different people and communicating what I was working on and struggling with, as well as proactively reaching out to others for assistance and guidance. This enabled me to learn a lot more than if I was just teaching myself, and it ensured that everyone's work was complementing each other's rather than duplicating efforts. I also got to know the employees and interns that I was working with, which was helpful for forming connections and learning more about other people's professional journeys.
Week 6:
Q: For your final post, upload a video presentation or create a written or photographic narrative in which you discuss your project.
A: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M5DrMegpgxqRVRJuxtcgZtd32fa_ClQJ/view?usp=sharing