Week 9! On Thursday, I had a really awesome buffet lunch with my PI at the The Carillon. The food was very delicious (I ate brisket, creamy potato soup, many desserts, etc.) :P and I really enjoyed talking to my advisor about her family, travels, research journey and advice, drama about American politics (too crazy and political AI fashion show video), and future project directions.

This week, I’ve been going into the office everyday at ~9am, and I’ve felt really excited about working there at a temporary desk. I’ve felt quite efficient this week in terms of work accomplished, but definitely have a lot more to do.

One huge accomplishment I’m happy about is that I took control of all Upwork messaging, recruiting, and onboarding: and finally, our medical expert annotation team is complete! We hired 5 people on Upwork, and now we’re in the medical expert training and pilot stage. Annotation will be expensive (>$3000), but I really think the work that we’re doing here is important for the future of medical claim checking.

I feel like I’ve been growing as a research leader, slowly taking on more responsibility, which is something fulfilling and exciting. I might possibly take on a side project to independently lead on Questions under Discussion, but I am figuring out my current research load first and need to do more reading and learning.

In terms of ACL prep (3 weeks away to go to Bangkok), Sebastian and I made a presentation video and prepared all the needed materials. We are prepped and ready to go (just need to buy a poster from PosterSmith).

I still have to respond to our medical experts and keep them in the loop multiple times per day, as well as work on more experiments, baselines, and run the information retrieval pipeline. For the rest of my time here, I definitely want to connect more with the Austin NLP Student community and explore Austin more.

Yay to 2 more weeks in Austin! 🤠🤠🤠🤠