Week 15, 2021
Work
A wonderful week at ## work. I started working on a Demand Response project. The US electric utilities use OpenADR protocol for Demand Response. Any company offering grid services must follow the OpenADR standard. Getting good hands- on experience with it. I have learned a lot this week which I can’t share here. I also spent some time networking with people outside the company. Attended the Clean Energy Leadership Institute’s (CELI) webinar and got a chance to hear some cool people talk. Side Project Got a chance this week to ## work on the Fire Progression Prediction project. I am still working on creating a pipeline for the fire data. At this point, we have around 183 unique fires in the United States over the last 10 years. The figure below shows the location of each of the fires. You might notice that each fire is a box. That box is part of the pre-processing. To feed data into the Neural Network, each input must be standardized. Each box in our project has the same size such that even the largest fire is contained within that box. Given that I am new to Google Earth Engine, this was a tough task to do but Professors at USF helped immensely. Next week hoping to finish the pre- processing completely and move on to working on the Neural Network.
Books
Practical Programming for Strength Training | Mark Rippertoe and Andy Baker I am on Page 203 out of 400. The book is now diving deep into each of the trainee groups. I finished with Novice training and now I am reading about training methods for overweight trainees. It is not super interesting at this point given that it is becoming irrelevant to me. But I’ll push through it and hopefully learn some other stuff as well. Deep Learning with PyTorch | Eli Stevens, Luca Antiga, and Thomas Viehman I am on page 192 out of 500. I wish I could have read more but laziness gets in the way. I am working on increasing mental endurance but that might take a while. Anyway, I am thoroughly enjoying the book.
Fitness
Gym: I started off the week with utmost commitment. Went for functional strength training at the gym. Using the techniques I learned in the book, I have now designed a workout routine in the gym. However, my knee gave up on Wednesday. That sucked. Mentally, I am always there. I am at the gym following my routine, focussing on my technique etc. but this week I realized I still have considerable physical limitations. I just need more patience to get through this. Swimming: I dived into the pool once this week. I swam for about 400 yards. It’s not much but It’s the longest I have swum in the last 1 year. So I’ll register that as a win. Biking: Rode just over 25 miles this week. Not good by any means but a decent comeback from the last 2 bad performing weeks.