During this week, I learned more about machine learning and how to apply the research. My cohort has helped me so much with the tutorials and learning activities. I also enjoyed the different presentations.
During Christina Crawford’s presentation we were tasked to come up with brainstorming list of all the ways to prevent a microaggression from happening. Once we were in our breakout rooms we discussed microaggressions in depth with our group. One member mentioned that it was important to ask as many questions as possible of certain groups of people to understand what was offensive to them. She mentioned that communication issues for and mannerisms of different cultures should be considered. I added that I think that having empathy for people is important for not only understanding the different cultures or different norms but also considering the different sensitivities of people. I fell that it is important to put yourself in their shoes and just understand that what you can see what you’re saying about one group that that you may have something that is equally offense would be you so you wouldn’t want anyone to offend you or say something that would that would make you less than a person. One final statement that Ms. Crawford wanted us to remember that microaggressions are verbal, brief behavioral or environmental indignities whether it’s intentional or conscious. They cause harm to another individual and we can stop them by having empathy by having direct conversations and removing assumptions when we’re interacting with diverse people from diverse groups.
Mel Bunya-Ananta’s presentation and work was targeted towards monitoring and assessing vascular disease in conjunction to developing models and evaluation of wearable devices. It was important to understand specifically as the adaptation of these different light skin to very dark skin and across people with varying levels of obesity there’s these wide variety changes that occur the skin that may cause these devices to be biased or not measure your heart rate or any factor that one’s heart health index factor for will accurately register results. PPG (photoplethysmography) abbreviated as PPG is just something that you see in all these different commercial devices like Fitbit the Apple Watch when there’s a light that’s been that’s flashing you that’s the PPG system So what the PPG does is it probes a specific area or specific section of the skin and in in this area there is blood that travels through it and this causes a change in the absorption of the light so as we know blood pressure is a significant factor of cardiac health and the pulsatility of the arterial network is governed by your cardiovascular system so PPG and the light responds to this change. In his research, FIU has monitored these different changes using a noninvasive device like a PPG. In turn it should be directly representative of what’s happening in the cardiac cycle and so that that’s the main motivation point all this and there are different influential factors of PPG that causes changes to the web form all these things we have here on the right side so there’s such things as age gender skin color.
