Week 2

Task List:

• work on RMDS challenge
• send website url to DREU
• data science course
• ML lecture with dr bein part 2
• request materials from dr bein when ready for more ML

Challenges:

This week I decided to join a competition by the City of LA to use data science to predict the spread of covid and provide insight for the city to determine what actions to take in reopening the businesses in the area. I decided to reach out to some members in the ACM-W club to work together and hopefully learn from them in this process. I haven’t had a lot of experience in cleaning data or the techniques for analysis yet, but I did provide my group members with datasets and ideas for what factors might be at risk through familiaizing myself with the relevant information.

Dr Bein mentioned something in passing during one of our meetings about how people were using some type of indicators in sewage to predict the spread of infection. I decided to look into datasets related to water contaminants and recreational bodies of water that people might be exposed to as summer begins. It took quite a long time to track down useful datasets for this that could be used with some of the infection and demographic datasets the competition organziers provided already.

It was a challenge for me to speak up in the group or even ask if anyone was participating, but my excitement over analyzing patterns in data and attempting to understand the connections through background research was strong enough to help me push through.

I do feel that maybe I flooded my teammates with too much info and posted too much on our discord. One of my teammates ended up leaving, so I hope I wasn’t too intense. I tried to express that my intention in participating was to learn rather than have a complete project and win. We were all busy with various responsibilities so we didn’t pair program or watch how anyone else worked, especially since we were working virtually rather than in person.

I had a hard time coping with the stress and deep anxiety of the protests and outrage on social media, especially since my county was put under a curfew. I had to take a break from social media. Just as I thought things were getting better and stores were slowly opening up, I was no longer allowed to leave the house and walk around on the side walks in the evening. Walking around when it’s cool helps me immensely with my managing my stress. I could only feel tension.

At some point I had to leave my house and stay over at my friend’s place to be able to calm down enough to function. Due to other circumstances, I couldn’t stay for more than a day, but luckily the curfew had relaxed not long after.

I spent most of this week learning more python commands from the Python course and how pyobject work using memory diagrams.

Resources used this week:

• Python in Data Science course

Next Steps:

• submit url for website
• get clarity on requirements / customize website
• finish learning python basics and jupyter notebooks on course