Week 20, 2021
The highlight this week was definitely my bike commute while returning from work. It’s a 7.5 miles commute with challenging elevation gain. I am used to it except SF experienced unusually high winds and I tried to go against it. But gave up and put my bike on a bus and returned home.
Work ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Work was slow this week. I worked on and finished only one analytical project. Rest of the tasks were reading, working with others with troubleshooting, and brainstorming a control logic to minimize green house gas emissions for a group of houses. I wish I was doing more analytically technical tasks but it is what it is.
Projects ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
Machine Learning Bootcamp
This bootcamp got very busy super fast. Currently studying linear regression with all its nuances. Uni-variate regression, multi-variate regression, using gradient descent to converge a model. Also completed 3 projects in the last week. Covid-19 infections predictions for Chicago, Covid-19 international cases and tests analysis and prediction, housing prices prediction using gradient descent. Here’s the link to my Github profile where I have uploaded the projects. https://github.com/unmeshmali25
CEEW – Sustainable Mobility Research Assistant
I started helping out CEEW with a hackathon type competition. The project is to make rapid assessment of bus stops in terms of accessibility and safety. So, looking at things like private cars parked in front of the bus stop, benches to sit on, curbs around the bus stop, lights etc. The project is on a very tight schedule. We have just over a month to deliver on this project. I started working on collecting data. Chasing 2 options right now. - Get locations of all the bus stops in an Indian city and programmatically download Google Street View Images at those locations. - Use web scrapping to download images that show up in google image search after typing in “bus stops in India” keyword. I have executed on the latter option. Next week, we’ll have to focus on using pre-trained models to run on our test images. Given that we don’t have a lot of time, going with pre-trained neural network models is out best bet.Books ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Couldn’t read anything this week 🙁
Fitness ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
- Gym: Went to 3 weight lifting sessions in this week. Since I missed last 2 weeks of weight lifting because of the flu and the second Pfizer shot, I realized I had regressed a lot in weight lifting. It is going to take committed couple weeks to get that strength back.
- Biking: I rode to work 2 times this week so I registered decent miles-just over 30 miles. However, one day while returning from work, San Francisco was experiencing unprecedented wind speeds of over 35 miles/hour. Also, on my way back home from work, I have to ride through a considerable elevation gain. So on that high wind day, I decided to put my bike on the bus and get back home. It was a good decision.