[Week Seven] How to Train Your Bat

Diana joins me this week to take on the task of training Bruce, our moody artificial echolocator. One of our biggest goals was to create a large dataset— 100,000 audio-depth samples from various rooms in the ISAT/CS building. Below are the problems we dealt with and the solutions we worked at: The current configuration of …

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[Week Six] Digitalized Audio vs Spectrograms

Team Sprague visited Dr. Rolf Mueller's lab at Virginia Tech last Friday to learn more about bats and collect data! To the left is a picture of the wall of plastic leaves that resides in the Mueller lab as a part of their research on how bats deal with foliage as they hunt. We used …

[Week Five] Divide It By Twenty…

This week's blog post will provide a brief overview of the project and news about breakthrough (!!!) that occurred this morning by Dr. Sprague. LET'S TALK ABOUT BATS. Bats have strong echolocating abilities that allow them to sense the physical world around them without having to use their eyes. Different bats emit different frequencies of calls; the …

[Week Four] Trial and Error and Trial and Error

The big question I tried to answer this week: Can raw audio samples compete with spectrograms as inputs to convolutional neural networks (CNN)? Although I don't yet have the conclusive data needed to pick a team, I have some bias for the raw audio, which trains faster by nature of its structure. I'm also grateful …

[Week Three] How Many Weights Does It Take to Overwhelm a GPU?

For a lengthy period of time earlier this week, there was a series of high frequency chirps roaming around the CS hallway. That was the sound of science. It was also the sound of Dr. Sprague collecting audio samples for the echolocation project (thank you!). Once I had over 13,000 samples at my disposal (thank …

[Week Two] Progress of Epoch Proportions

I have a research project! In the long run, I hope to have implemented an algorithm that utilizes neural networks to detect how far away objects are and produces the corresponding depth maps. The ultimate goal is to create a device that aids blind people with "visualizing" the space in front of them based on …

[Week One] Neurons, Bats, and Atari

It's the first week of JMU's CS REU! Lots of acronyms! I am a rising junior from Swarthmore College, and I am here this summer to absorb as much information as I can about what it means to conduct research in computer science. The questions with yet-to-be discovered answers, the trials and errors, the foundational theory …