Week 3/17/14 - 3/24/14

·     This week, I submitted a title and abstract to YSU's QUEST forum for student scholarship. My talk is going to be this Tuesday 4/1/14. I am very excited to present our research at this venue and have been working hard to create the presentation and practice it. 

     

    I am also attending the Ohio MAA sectional conference this friday where I will present all of the mathematics that I have learned to accompany this project. I am going to talk about the difference between similarity measures that are metrics and ones that are non-metrics. A metric is simply a function that preserves distance or always satisfies the triangle inequality. There is a lot of debate currently going on about wether or not it is important to use metrics. This topic is truly interdisciplinary (since it spans the subjects of Ecology, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Mathematics). In fact, the book I am currently ready on the subject is all about interpreting ecological data. I also intend to do an analysis of the techniques used for our model to determine if they are distance preserving or not. If time is permitting, I will also talk about subadditive and supperadditive functions, and the role they plan in this conundrum. 

·       

    The first very rough draft of our Grace Hopper Celebration poster has been created. Much work is still needed to get this ready for the conference, but we have plenty of time. I chose to create the poster in LaTex, because I really enjoy typesetting!

· 

Week 3/10/14

Our two papers have been accepted to the 2014 MSR Conference! One is a data paper that explains in detail how our data was collected and preprocessed.  The other paper was a short research paper that explains the progress we have made thus far. We received a list of referee comments for both papers. We will be busy over the next week or so making these changes and getting our papers camera ready. Once these revisions are made, we will resubmit the papers for final approval.  We will then travel to Hyperbad India to present this research!

I also wrote our extended abstract for the GHC poster session. We have already submitted this. I need to get working on our poster now. I am torn between using latex or an office environment to create this poster.  I really like latex and the equations will look sharp, but some formatting parts can really be finicky.

I also submitted an abstract to the Ohio MAA sectional math fest. In this presentation, I intend to talk more about the underlying math of the project and how it all comes together.

My list of research supplies from the USR Grant has been approved and ordered. I am getting three books that should be very helpful to understand all of the different aspects of the project. I am also getting a two terabyte portable hard drive to store the immense amounts of data needed for our study and a headset for our weekly online meetings.

Week 2/24/14 - 3/3/14

      This week, I presented our research at the Regional Pi Mu Epsilon Conference. I gave a 15 minute presentation. I talked about the goals of this research, the importance for software companies to look into these problems, the basic techniques involved, new features that we considered, and the results obtained. The talk went well. The audience seemed really interested and had a bunch of questions. I really enjoyed attending the conference. I got to see some interesting talks given by fellow students. It was a really great experience. 

      I also wrote some sort pseudo code for the programs I previously wrote. We may include this in future papers or just have it on file to look back on. its really weird converting from actual code to pseudo code. I generally do this in the reverse direction. 

  

      I also read a very advanced thesis paper on LDA. I have to admit this was a hard read. It used a lot of probability theory that I have never seen before. I am going to have to do a lot of background reading to get a better sense of what was done. 

    

      Since we received the USR grant from Youngstown State University, I am also getting together a list of possible books, equipment, or accessories that will help us in our research.