Week 2 (May 25 - May 31)

After exchanging a couple of slack messages, Tiago, my primary mentor, schedules a brief discussion on the project with me and the other mentors on May 27th. The meeting takes place via a Zoom call. During the session, we introduce ourselves. The mentors specifically highlight areas in which their strength lies and how I could seek their advice depending on the domain of the problem to leverage their expertise. There is also a separate slack channel project_construal_2021 to update all the mentors at once at every stage of the project.

Following are some of the key takeaways from the meeting:

• Aim at making small advancements that resembles a minuscule improvement when comparing to the existing systems. Since the topic of detecting meaning from a multimodal input has not been explored extensively due to the difficulty in understanding several interpretations possible, making even a small contribution in the right direction is challenging.

• Even creating an alogrithm for captioning of hand gestures in a 2D co-ordinate space is tricky due to multiple interpretations of the scene understanding by annotators/end-users. As a result, the Inter-Annotator Agreement tends to be quite low in this scenario.

The next day, we have our first introductory meeting with all the 12 GSoC selected students under Red Hen and the mentors. The meeting agenda is to introduce all the mentor(s)-mentee(s) and get to know the cohort better. Each student spoke about their project, their assigned mentors and came up with questions that could benefit others in navigating the project more smoothly.