GRIP, Research Abroad Steep Learning Curve

Engineering Research in Singapore

After completing my first year at Penn, I was fresh from a Signal and Information Processing class. I enjoyed that class very much and the last part of the class that touched slightly on machine learning really intrigued me. Thus, I was really excited about my research in Singapore, which is about Deep Learning for Medical Recognition.

During the first half of the research, I managed to learn and apply image processing skills in real life. Moreover, I was exposed to different deep learning models in my team’s search for the most suitable one for the project. At the start of the research, I had to do lots of readings on papers and literature as I did not have a solid enough understanding of deep learning to tackle the research challenge. Because of that, I had a relatively steep learning curve and was able to grasp the physical applications.

The goal of the research project was to use deep learning to create a system that can identify pills when a picture of a pill is taken. Hence, my team decided to create a web application that could identify pills in a picture with multiple pills. We always work together in bringing the project together. But at the same time, each one of us would focus on a different aspect of the project in order to maximize efficiency and to ensure that all of us could work on something we are passionate about. I focused on pill detection and being able to separate an image with multiple pills into images with each individual pill for recognition purposes.

I am very grateful to my professor as he gave us much flexibility to take the project in any direction that we were interested in. Moreover, we were allowed to work flexible hours and could also work from anywhere as long as we did not need the lab equipment. Hence, my team and I could do the project in our own time, which helped us to be more productive when getting work done, and also allowed us to explore Singapore sufficiently.

My professor is also a very kind person who is always willing to support our ideas and help us when necessary. He will always be there if needed to guide us in our project and to answer any of our questions.

I am greatly enjoying my first research experience in Singapore and I look forward to our end product!