This week I attended a meeting with the entire lab of my project mentor, Dr. Wang. The meeting was at 7am PDT for me (9am CT for the group), so this is an aspect of my virtual DREU that I had not thought about until the meeting, but it went well nevertheless! I met other PhD students in Dr. Wang’s lab and another undergraduate research assistant who will be working on another project this summer.

This week I also attended a meeting with the REU program about developing one’s professional persona. We broke off into small groups to discuss our experiences with networking and personas when it comes to networking, and it was nice to meet some other REU participants.

This week I worked on creating a comparative list of deep fake generative open source models that we may use for the project. We met during our weekly lab meeting and decided to go with StyleGAN2, which is a foundational method for deep fake GANs, or generative adversarial networks. After that, I worked on running the code on my own machine to see what we need to go to set it up and I did run into some issues given that the code is only supported for Linux and Windows machines because some installations it requires discontinued support for Mac, which is what I have. I hope to soon get access to the UIUC servers so that I can work on the code there, but I have been getting more familiar with the code overall because I have had to run into lots of errors in running it. I believe we will be starting to set up the pilot study for the user study in a week or so once we get the text and image content generated.