UCSD COSMOS Cluster 12 - 2023

The students have been working hard on their projects these past three weeks that I surprised them with some treats this week!  On Thursday, students got to enjoy some lumpia from Lia's Lumpia .  Lia's Lumpia was one of the finalists on the Food Network's Great Food Truck Race (Holiday Hustle Edition).  They now have a brick and mortar restaurant and after trying some of the spring rolls in the dining commons, I knew they had to try some GREAT lumpia!  Students could try some Lola's lumpia (traditional lumpia), mac and cheese lumpia, or vegan curry lumpia.  DELISH!  If you are in San Diego, you really should check them out! On Friday, I surprised students with homemade cupcakes.  I baked them devil's food cupcakes with vanilla cream cheese frosting.  No boxed stuff here.  All made from scratch! Students enjoyed their mid-day snack.

The last few days we've natural language processing algorithms to do sentiment analysis.  It provides us an ability to teach a computer to determine if sentences (such as in a review) reflect a particular feeling (good, bad, happy, sad, etc.).  We got to see how some of the math we've learned in school (and sometimes math we haven't seen yet, but will soon) applies to things the people use everyday.  It was challenging but through the process we realized that we learned a lot. Congratulations to Tomas and Stik for their project "Crazy Captions" as the Faculty Choice Award winners.  The People's Choice Award went to "Cookin' at COSMOS" by Ronit and Samuel. On Thursday, we presented our NLP projects.  You can see our presentations below. Jyoti and Andrea - Palate Picks Slides | Demo Amishi and Faith - AI Attitude Slides | Demo Sagana and Isaac - StoryGPT Slides | Demo Perla and Minseo - Toxic Gossip Train Slides | Demo Kathy and Aarushi - Can We St...

On Monday, July 24, students presented their neural network classification projects.  Students were tasked with training their model to identify images and create an application around it.  At the conclusion, the students voted for their "People's Choice Award" for their favorite application created.  The teaching team (faculty, cluster assistants and teacher fellow) selected the "Faculty Choice Award". Congratulations to our Faculty Choice Award winners: Angie and Aamir.  We had a tie for the People's Choice Awards!  Congratulations to Jyoti and Ronit and Samuel and Angelina. You can view everyone's presentation, slide deck and demo (if available) below. Amishi and Tomas - "Pixel Playoffs" Slides | Demo Ethan C. and Gaby - "Animal Pictionary" Slides | Demo Aarushi and Stanley - "Pictionary" Slides | Demo Ethan K. and Faith - "Scribble.io" Slides | Demo Samuel and Angelina - "Draw Off!" People's Choic...

On Wednesday, students presented their work on Spotify data using either k- Nearest Neighbors, k- Means Clustering or logistic regression.  They needed to also include a visualization of their data.  This was their first "formal" presentation of the cluster. They implemented algorithms to have the machine make suggestions or predictions about data.  Some created their own versions of recommender systems (based on songs, playlists, determining if a song is of a specific genre, etc.). Students determined what features were relevant and commented on any observations.  Below are their presentations.  Congratulations to Faculty Choice Award winners Faith and Ronit and People's Choice Award winner Angie and Isaac.  Andrea, Robert and Aamir Song Recommendation Algorithm :  Presentation Slides Angelina and Stik Recommendation Spotify Project :  Presentation Slides Minseo and Samuel Spotify Project :  Presentation Slides Amishi and Rhyan Spotify Playl...

On Tuesday, we had a field trip to Google to learn about how they use machine learning in their products. We toured the offices.  The space is themed to fit the San Diego vibe with areas/spaces named after locations in San Diego and décor to match scenery in the county. We got to see their lounges as well as micro-kitchens. Our host Sam was great in sharing about Google, its work culture and products. We appreciate all the time and energy it took to host us.  Everyone had a great time!

Our first Friday of COSMOS, we had a big event that our whole cluster worked together all week on -- COSMOlympics!  We competed against other clusters in various events.  It was a great ice-breaker, cluster bonding event.  Below is a video on our skit, musical towels and photos from our balloon toss.  It was a fun evening and as a Teacher Fellow, I'm so proud of the entertaining story of their skit and how the cluster did. Musical Towels (Chairs) Event Water Balloon Toss Event 2023 Cluster 12 Skit "What happens when you break the COSMOS rules?" Some photos: