Last Minute Change in Project Direction

Today has been a rollercoaster. I felt overwhelmed by my looming project deadline and having taken on more work by signing up for ICP. This led me to explain my difficulties to one of the support staff at ICP, Leigh, who works for the Curtin Institute for Data Science. This was an opportunity to discuss my project with a subject matter expert who significantly helped refine my understanding of Machine Learning and gave me a clearer idea of where to progress my project next.

My original project description was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to diagnose diabetes from digital medical records. My supervisor provided this topic, but it was up to me to source the data and learn how to perform NLP. I had frequent contact with my supervisor towards the start of the year, but we didn't bond well and have had no contact for the past few months. The lack of engagement and mentorship left me feeling lost and undirected with my project.

Leigh spent a couple of hours with me to demystify what Machine Learning is and provided me with some resources to help implement this for my project. He also talked me through data handling for machine learning and explained some of the common trip-ups I might have while processing the data. Finally, he explained to me why NLP wasn't a good fit for this project and the style of medical records I had obtained. Although there's a lot to do in a short amount of time, I will give my best effort and focus on providing a detailed and well-written report so I can still succeed in this unit.