This week I worked on writing a script to generate the social media profiles initially based on raw resume data. After realizing I had hardware incompatibilities in trying to run the deep fake generation open source algorithm, I took over this other task for most of this week. Writing the script involved using MongoDB data and Python to generate an HTML file based on a template HTML file taken from the LinkedIn website code that can be accessed directly on their website. I had never written Python that interacts with web programming, but I do have web programming background so it was a good skill to pick up.

This week I also met with my other mentor, Dr. Khurana, and we talked about her graduate school experiences and experiences as a professor in her field of theory and cryptography. I asked her a lot of questions about choosing her research field, school, advisors, etc. and also her experiences as a woman in the field and in graduate school. It was a really valuable conversation and I’m glad I am able to have this type of mentorship through this program.

I also attended the weekly REU Lunch and Learn event about writing and publishing academic research. It was really helpful to learn the differences between conferences and journals and also the process of writing papers. The speakers gave lots of helpful pieces of advice when it comes to writing papers and the research process overall with the goal of publication.

This week I felt that I was really beginning to contribute to my research project, so things are definitely moving along and I am excited to participate and contribute more throughout the next weeks as we begin to prepare the user study. I spoke with one of the PhD students working on this project to talk about next steps in terms of tasks, so next week we will organize and solidify the methodology for the user study and profile generation, and to prepare I will be reading some papers to learn about types of methodologies that we may focus on to create the basis for our study.