June 2, 2025
Day 5 – Official 1st Day Kickoff!
What I Learned
Today, we began with an official introductory presentation to kick off our first day. We met our mentors in person as well as participated in an interactive demo to gain a better understanding of how LLMs work and the disparities that may be presented. Before we headed off to lunch, we participated in a team-building exercise within our project groups, where we had to build the tallest structure utilizing spaghetti pasta, tape, and a marshmallow. After returning from lunch, we broke off into our project groups. My group primarily discussed a range of African Diaspora history, looked over similar websites so we can gain an understanding of what we could potentially make, discussed features, as well as our potential intended audience. There’s ALOT that needs to be done for us to be successful, we plan to begin with our foundation of creating a well-researched and robust custom dataset that the site will use.
Tbd
Blockers
None today.
Reflection
Today was quite exciting as we finally began discussing tangible deliverables that we will soon need to complete. I’m very excited to see the progress of our project, especially since my group members come from little to no programming experience, so the different backgrounds could make for some great ideas. I believe this project is essential outside of AI research, as having a centralized hub of information about the African Diaspora would be super beneficial to have as a resource for learning and research purposes.