Life updates
Wow, so I haven’t updated my blog in a while…
My first year of grad school at UIUC has gone and went, and I’ve accomplished quite a bit since entering the MS CS program last fall.
I wrote three research papers related to a variety of topics:
Nearest Neighbor Classication for Classical Image Upsampling with Nic Prate. We wrote this for a class on Machine Learning for Signal Processing in December 2023, and I was very excited to finally get a paper published (and read by other researchers) on arXiv.
Optical Music Recognition for LilyPond File Generation: A short survey paper evaluating the usefulness of the music notation scheme Lilypond for machine learning. I wrote this paper in early May 2024 for a course in Machine Learning for Computer Vision.
Bayesian Grading: Analysis of Scores in the Context of Cheating with Victor Zhao and Yuxuan Chen, also written in May 2024. We analyzed unproctored and proctored student scores through Bayesian probability and lengthy simulation for a topics course on computer education. No paper to release yet, as we’re still working on a final draft for submission to a SIGCSE conference. I’ll update this when the submission is done.
I also had a fair share of obstacles during the year, like getting used to the leap from undergrad to grad work, learning that I’m not the biggest fan of Numerical Analysis (the hard way), and of course, juggling the aforementioned papers and thesis preparation throughout the year.
Speaking of thesis preparation, I’m spending the summer performing experiments towards my thesis to be deposited in May 2025. Without spoiling too much detail: generative AI models have gotten incredibly good at generating audio, depending on what kind of sound you’re trying to replicate. After reading about Google DeepMind’s WaveNet, and listening to AI-generated samples of piano music, I wondered if more work could be done. The samples sounded realistic, but the musical material is all junk. Maybe the model could be conditioned on sheet music to perform something more… coherent?
Finally, for my 2024 New Year’s Resolution, I started learning Chinese in my free time with Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. Four months in, my vocabulary is quite small, but I’m starting to pick up some of the characters I’ve learned in outside context, (John Cena 和我都喜欢吃冰淇淋！) I also learned that UIUC holds Language Conversation Tables for practicing speaking new languages, so I’m excited to attend those next fall.
Expect significant updates to this website as I move things around and try to start writing frequent blog posts.