My eighth week of my DREU program coincided with the final week of the UIUC CS REU program’s last week, so I participated in a virtual research showcase in which I created a video presenting my work from this past summer. It was great to watch other students’ videos and learn about all the other research projects going on in the CS department.

In this week’s lab meeting, we had a crazy idea day in which everyone (including me) presented a crazy research idea they have in a few slides for about 10-15 minutes. It’s a great exercise my mentor Dr. Wang has his students do to keep to ideas flowing. I presented on a romance scam detection idea, and it was a good experience to practice doing research and presenting preliminary ideas.

For my project, we also made good progress towards starting the pilot study because we realized we have to create an entire server behind our survey to provide the necessary data under certain conditions in the study. We are working on that now, and we should get that up and running this coming week, so I have been learning about Django in order to do that.

It’s crazy that it’s already my ninth week, so I hope we get the study started soon!