Now that SGI has come to a close, it’s time to talk about my experiences from the second half of the program. During the fourth week of the program, we worked heavily with machine learning and training models, specifically NeRFies. Since I have a lack of machine learning experience, it was difficult to understand all of the code. Model building and training are different ways of thinking that I am not used to.
We were paired up to work on different parts of the code, and again, this was incredibly helpful. Even though my partner did not have extensive coding research, having someone to talk the code through with was incredibly helpful. Everyone on this project was understanding and helpful when we did not understand something.
For the last two weeks, I have been on the same project. This project was introduced with very direct applications, which piqued my interest. Our focus was on computer graphics, specifically modeling surfaces with discrete equivalence classes. While there have been several papers published on this idea, we were specifically focusing on using as few different polygons as possible. We worked on understanding the code and process by which this could be accomplished.
If you were to build a surface with polygons, it would be much easier and cheaper with only two unique polygons in comparison to hundreds of unique polygons. While I have previously not had any research or interest in computer graphics, it is now a field I am interested in learning more about.
Overall, this experience was so out of my comfort zone. I worked with several people, all with various methods of research. This process not only helped me find out more about my preferred research style but also how to adapt to different styles of research.
Finally, I not only learned more about coding and geometry processing, but I also learned what it is like to be confused and how to be okay with that. Research is all about asking questions that may not have answers and then trying. Our efforts may not always have publishable results, but that does not mean we should stop asking questions.
Thank you all for the wonderful, challenging experience of SGI.
