Week 1

May 26th - May 31st: The Beginning

Week 0 < ----------------- > Week 2

Since it was Memorial Day on Monday, my first day of work did not begin until Tuesday. I spent Monday chilling out and unpacking my stuff at the house and I walked around campus to check things out. OSU is so beautiful with flowers everywhere and the cool old buildings.

Tuesday I got introduced to the team at their weekly meeting and found out the different possibilities of the project that I may get to work on. The project as a whole focuses on Signal Processing and Machine Learning. Two things that I really had no knowledge of before this project. So most of the week was just reading some of the papers that the team has put together on their project and papers that others had written on the topics. Forrest (the Phd Student on the project) introduced me to the code he has written so far. Towards the end of the week he gave me a task to do some coding reusing some of his code to implement a program that sums up the energy in a Spectrogram and outputs the top X% of chunks of the audio and chunks of the spectrogram that have the greater energy. This was more a project to get me familiar with working with the code, but it is also one method that we are using to pick out the possible bird songs in a long recording.

There are two parts of the project that they may have me work on. One is working more on the signal processing side and coming up with a good method of cleaning up the recordings from the HJ Andrews Research Forest. A lot of the audio recordings are muffled by streams that lie in the valleys of almost all the hills in the forest. Each of the recordings from the forest are around 20 minutes long and we want an efficient way to clear up the sound by getting rid of the background noise so that we can clearly pick out the birds songs and effectively label them to the species of bird. The other part of the project that I may get to work on is creating an interface for the ecologists to work with that allows them to manually classify audio clips to add to the training set of recordings. I have never worked with any GUI applications or any sort of signal processing so the whole project seems kinda of overwhelming.

WEEKEND: Living off of campus has been so nice, and I am glad I ended up in the situation I am in. If I were to live in the dorms, I don't think it would be bad, especially right now, but the semester will be ending soon and I guess most of the students end up leaving the town. But my roommates will still be here, and we will continue to have a good time, hopefully. On Saturday I went with Forrest and two of the ecologists on our team to visit the research forest where we are collecting our data from. I got to see how the devices they are using to collect the audio data and the environment in which the recordings are coming from. It was a really cool experience. Pictures of the song meters are found in the photo gallery.