Justin Weltz, a PhD student at Duke, talked to us over a Zoom call about the pros and cons of random sampling as well as reinforcement learning, which is machine learning (which we touched upon with Alex and Dr. Laber) that concerns how agents should act in order to maximize the “rewards” they get (rewards are basically like treats for a program if it does what it’s told). He spoke about what fields he utilizes these in, such as precision medicine. Afterwards, we got the opportunity to speak with him about what being a PhD student is like and what doing research is like for him.
