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Today we talked about unreal engine and the different uses of it, such as game development, movie making, and art purposes. I worked on making a meta human and trying to make it look like myself, but I did not do so well with that. So now I am trying to make a meta human that looks like my dad and hopefully it will work out.

(attempt at making Ravi)

Chris cleaning those emails

The General Assembly

The Mall

Today was my first day working with Rep. Martin at the NC house of representatives. My day began in his office with is Legislative Assistant Chris. There was no session today so Rep. Martin was not here. While Chris cleaned his email we talked about his job as an L.A., his experience at an HBCU, his experience here as one of few HBCU graduates, and staying neutral on social media. We also talked about how this job is like seeing the books come alive. Seeing bills created and lobbyist in action. Then his intern Lee arrived so they decided to take me on a tour of the legislative campus. We walked by all of the senate and house offices. We saw my districts Rep, Joe Johnson, the deputy whips, and the party leaders, and the lt. governors office. We talked about the lack of Republican members in mask, we decided it’s a political move to prove party loyalty. We went inside the General Assembly and talked about the seniority in seating assignments. But then this lady from the speakers office and told us we weren’t allowed to be there without a member (oops!). We then walked on the mall and saw the department of education, and the department of motor vehicles. We talked about Jeff Jacksons campaign for senator, Chris and Lee are not confident in his nomination. Then we returned to Rep. Martins office where I listened in on Chris’s phone call with Mr. Assad. Mr. Assad very angry with the way he is being treated as a veteran (Rep. Martin is the chairman of the Veteran Affairs Committee). He is having trouble registering for help as a disabled persons. He is frustrated with the way his case is being handled. Chris is trying to help him by talking to his representative. They said they would call Mr. Assad but they never did. Then we went to Rep. Johns office where I met with him and discussed charter schools and the upcoming redistricting and possible gerrymandering. When we returned to Rep. Martins office, Lee was helping a woman with her stimulus checks. Then I sat in on a call Lee had with a lady advocating for medical marijuana. Then the day was done!

Today, we were introduced to Dr. Laber, a professor at Duke and the head of Laber Labs, a research lab that researches different questions, mainly related to medicine, and uses methods like statistics and reinforcement learning to solve them.

Pictured below is an outreach project where Reinforcement Learning was used to “teach” a computer to play the Laser Cat game.

For the rest of the day, we’ll be working on simulating something called the Monty Hall Problem. Basically, there are 3 doors. Two have something you don’t want and the third has something you do want. You choose one door and another one is eliminated, leaving you to choose to either open your current door or switch to the other remaining one. What we’re doing is building a dataset to see how often you win when you switch doors and if there is a correlation between switching doors and winning.

Test post!

Mindy Quigley will be helping me learn the author’s craft. She’s awesome!

Today, I had the opportunity to have a quick call with Mindy Quigley, an award winning mystery author. She gave me lots of advice on writing query letters, told me some background about how she got published and gave stories of lots of her friends who are also published writers. Ms. Quigley is getting me in touch with some of her colleagues, so I look forward to lots of interesting advice and stories over the rest of the program! Specifically, we had a wonderful conversation about the use of pitches and how to write them for specific genres like romance, mysteries and westerns.