Spring Report

Report for GAANN Fellowship Spring 2022

Report

For the spring semester of 2022 my primary focus has, yet again, been on teaching ITCS 4156 Intro to Machine Learning. Additionally, I submitted my survey paper to ACM Computing Surveys.

Teaching ITCS 4156: Intro to Machine Learning

Now that I have developed materials for my course, my main focus this semester has been on refining said materials and fixing any new bugs. As per last semester, students really seemed to be enjoying the flipped classroom style. Moreover, they seemed to be finding the notes and labs I have developed very useful. One major complaint I have seen is that the lecture portion of the class can be a bit long. This is hard to balance as some students wish to just get started with the lab while others like to listen to the lecture to reinforce the ideas they learned at home. Balancing this has proven to be the most difficult part of teaching so far.

Research

With regards to my research, my survey paper “Towards Interactive Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsic Feedback” was rejected but given the opportunity to resubmit with revisions. I plan to make revisions to the paper and resubmit over the summer. Additionally, I have finished the capturing of BCI experiments for my BCI related paper. Now, using the data collected, I need to train the algorithms and conduct the analysis of the results. I am hoping to submit this work to SSCI this coming fall. Finally, I was invited to give a talk at an RLDM workshop on humans in (and around) the loop. Thus, I plan to attend the conference and share my interactive RL with intrinsic feedback related work there.