I started with the HPCC Systems team at LexisNexis on May 10, 2021; as today is Monday, June 7, this post marks the beginning of my fifth week. Throughout this summer, I've been working with a team comprised of Roger Dev and two other LN interns on expanding and enhancing the HPCC Systems Causality toolkit, which provides implementations of core algorithms for modeling causal relationships within data.
I'm starting this blog a little late into my internship, but it happens to be great timing as this weeks marks the start of my implementation phase. I dedicated the first month of my internship to preliminary research, as this area of statistics -- causality -- is a field which is both very new and rather complex. Though I'd initially allotted two weeks for this phase, understanding the grounding theory for this project ended up being a much more challenging task than I'd anticipated.
Starting today, I'll be uploading daily posts which summarize my progress, challenges, and breakthroughs as I complete the second half of my summer internship; I think that documenting my learning journey for this remaining bloc will be a very useful exercise. Next step: understanding the causality toolkit src!