special.acknowledgments mission.objectives updates.june
Dr. Cathy Jiao
Cathy is both warm and demanding, a combination which is incredibly motivating. She has been very accomodating, going out of her way on several occasions to ensure that I would be working on the project that would be most rewarding to me. Without her constant support and advice, I would be completely lost.

Chris Symons
Chris spent a great deal of time getting me up to speed on some of the more complicated machine learning techniques that I was trying to learn in such a short period.

Dr. Tom Potok
Tom is always glad to have me into his office as often as I needed for advice and help. He played a great part in making me feel at home in their group.
I feel very lucky to have received this internship, and I intend to take full advantage of this opportunity. My very general goal for this summer is to gain some experience of what computer science research is like. I have been having a hard time deciding between persuing my Masters or Ph.D. and I believe that this experience may serve to enlighten me as to my own strengths and weaknesses.

I have both an interest in image recognition and natural language processing and was excited to learn that there is a group here at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that specializes in this area. I feel extremely lucky to be working with such recognized and intelligent individuals, and hope to meet and perhaps surpass expectations. Ultimately I would like to co-author a paper with my mentor, and perhaps even publish in one of the more selective natural language processing journals. I believe with my expert leadership, this may be an achievable goal.
June 12, 2007
I completed my project proposal today, which lays out in detail my syllabus for the remainder of my internship. This was a major milestone in the progression of the project.

June 11, 2007
Today I gave my first presentation to a subset of our group, and I believe it went well. There was certainly room for improvement, but for the most part I'm told I was relatively clear. It ran for about an hour and 15 minutes, but I believe I can shave it down for my next presentation on Wednesday.