First Professional Research Paper
This was the first research paper I was in from start to end. The problem we found at the time that Google Maps does not have different scenes of the same area. Imagine the street that you grew up on. That street looked different during the day as well as at night. Moreover, during the fall, winter, spring, and summer that street slightly changed. Google Maps was not able to capture these moments and display them. This would be the main problem would be the start of my research paper on AI. Using AI to combine two separate images to create a new image.
While the topic of researching AI and creating new images sounded fun we ran into many issues. The first issue we encountered was our environment. As I was learning how to use AI modules I found that these models perform much better on a GPU. Some models do not even work unless you run them on a GPU. My setup at the time was an Acer Aspire E15 laptop with an MX150 GPU. For those who don't know or even remember this laptop, it was a low to middle tier laptop that could play some games and do some light video editing. However, this laptop served me well and is one I would still recommend it even today for new college students looking to buy a cheap laptop. Back to our main topic, after testing different AI models I found my laptop was slow at running these models. One of my supervisors pitched the idea of a remote device that I could access using a VPN. However, the VPN was very slow which slowed down any file transfers and power outages were common in the area and I had to wait for my supervisor to turn the device back on. Then the year 2020 came.
As many remember, the year 2020 brought about the pandemic. Which means my work and communication were halted. Previously I would go to campus to work on my research project and once a week meet with my supervisors about my progress and what to work on next. The transition was really hard on the project as mentioned before my laptop could not perform the task of running an AI model. Luckily, being an ODU student I could request access to the high-performance computing environment or the HPC. Moreover, the VPN used to connect to the HPC network was much faster than the previous VPN I used. Therefore, transferring my project files only took a couple of hours compared to a day. Yes, the previous VPN and the HPC VPN were very slow but were my only options. Everything was going great using a new environment that could handle the task of running an AI model. The entire project was in another location so it became a pseudo backup. We were also collecting a good amount of data. Then another tragedy occurred my laptop wouldn't turn on again.
Yes, during the pandemic when all work had to be done remotely my laptop completely stopped working. I had zero access to another computer since I didn't have the money to purchase a desktop, ODU was still closed due to the pandemic, and I wouldn't have been able to access a laptop at home for a lengthy amount of time. The silver lining to all this was I had backed up all my work the day before. Zero data was lost, I just had no way of accessing it. The pandemic did allow me to get creative in the fact that many people were buying and selling used items on different marketplaces like Facebook or Craigslist. After selling some personal items I was able to get enough money to purchase a laptop. A couple conversations later I purchased another laptop and restored all of my data from my previous laptop. During this time places were starting to open back up.
Now comes the time to write the paper, combine all the data I gathered, connect all the resources I used, and place the graphs I created. It felt a little overwhelming. Especially since professional research papers start with a specific layout where everything should be placed in a specific manner. Everything counted. However, having a communication channel with my supervisors helped because they had written research papers before and knew what common problems I would encounter. For example, in Microsoft Word, there is a specific format on how to input specific formulas. However, for research papers, they should be adequately spaced around paragraphs so there is not a lot of whitespace but enough to see the formula. With constant back and forth with my supervisors I was able to complete my first research paper.