Research-Based Decision Making

Elaborating on whether I have achieved my personal goal of basing my decisions in research.

Defining the Goal

Projects involve a lot of decision making. My goal was to ensure these decisions were always grounded in research and/or insight from experts. This makes it so the general goals of the project are always put first, and each decision is put in the context of the rest of the project.

Factors Contributing to the Goal

Before any development could be done, research into the domain itself was needed. I had no idea about action units, the FACS system or the greater context of the VIBE project. These were tools I needed before I could make a plan of attack related to the validation pipeline. Based on this, it was possible to create a general flow and determine what was needed to create a validation pipeline.

During (and after) the creation of my project plan, I worked on a prototype using the chosen facial analysis library. This offered me the opportunity to investigate how I was going to achieve the desired functionality. It also informed me what aspects of the pipeline where important, and therefore what technology to use.

Once this was determined, I stepped into a larger realm of possibilities and unknowns: software architecture and cloud infrastructure. Leveraging the expert advice of both Bartosz Paszkowski and Mark Klerkx, I was able to create a solid software architecture and learn how to use Azure services effectively to implement it.

Have I Achieved This Goal?

When compiling the section above, it dawned on me how much research was actually done during this internship. My decision to use new technology bears fruit here, as it forced me to research extensively not only what to do but how to do it.