I started off this week by meeting Danielle Chase, a postdoctoral fellow working in Dr. Peleg’s lab, who I will be working directly under. She introduced me to the project and went over the basics of what we will be doing this semester. Following that initial conversation, I read two papers (“Collective Mechanical Adaptation of Honeybee Swarms” and “Instance Segmentation of Densely Packed Cells Using a Hybrid Model of U-Net and Mask R-CNN”) to help familiarize myself with the lab’s previous work as well as some methodology we are hoping to use in the near future. I then spent the majority of the week labeling individual bees in 3D images in order to use for training data (starting off with a cube containing about 50 bees); I also began looking into the basics of topological data analysis and visualizing data using Napari.