Week 7

Week 7 has been a short but crucial week for Kate and I.  We started off by attending a group meeting with Kristian Kersting, Dr. Natarajan, and Dr. Natarajans lab.  During this meeting, Kate and I got to present a brief five minute slide show of our project, and discuss some of the results we found thus far.  After our presentation we got some good feed back and suggestions from our audience.  For example, we were told to get the FNR and accuracy rates for our BDe network.  We got some interesting results from implementing these scoring metrics.  After this, we took Tuesday July 4th off, given that it’s a national holiday.  On Wednesday we came into the office ready to make some serious progress on our project since it was the middle of week 7 and we only have a few more weeks left.  We continued working on getting the correct FNR and accuracy rates.  I also began to work on the story line for our video presentation that is due at the end of our 10 weeks. Thankfully, I had our presentation from Monday to use as good reference to what is going to go into the video.  With the presentation, I changed and add some new things, I also made a draft of what I am going to say while narrating the video(both the draft presentation and notes can be found on the google drive).  I decided to briefly discuss our motivation for doing our research.  After, I gave a brief overview of our implementation of a Bayesian network using CARDIA data to examine the interactions amongst risk factors that correlate to the development of Coronary Heart Disease, and then presented our findings.   Also on Wednesday, I got the opportunity to attend two senior Ph. D thesis presentations, from two of Dr. Natarajans students.  To say the least, these presentations were extremely interesting.  Although, I did not understand some of the things that the presenters were addressing, it still made for a great learning experience.  Thursday, I began my morning by working on the reviewers response table from our week 6 peer review.  Then, I began to add some more details to our poster, such as, a flow diagram that shows a timeline of how we got our results ( This can be viewed on the google drive).  Then, at 11:30 Kate, Nandini, and I met with Noah who is a Economist in pursuit of his Ph. D.  We talked about the different approach that a data scientist or machine learning expert would take versus an Economist and how we can possible find a middle ground between the two, resulting in more accurate models of real world data.  In the afternoon.  Kate and I continued to make progress on our paper and discussed some potential steps we can take to advance our research.  Friday began as usual with our weekly meeting where we discuss what we accomplished during the week and what we hope to  accomplish next week.  Then, I began do some practice trials of my lightening talk to prepare for our afternoon session.  After, this the rest of the REU students and myself decorated Tom’s office for his birthday.  Last,  I went to the afternoon tea session where each of the groups gave their one minute lightening speech (our presentation slides can be found on the google drive) and we concluded by eating pizza and cupcakes.

Meeting with Dr. Natarajan went well this week, although he did not have much time because he had guests from out of town and is preparing to move to Texas in the coming days.  With that being said, Friday Kate and I said our fairwells to Dr. Natarajan.  It was rather sad being that Kate and  I were just getting to know Dr. Natarajan, and now he has to leave :/.  Other than that, Kate and I had some successful meeting with Nandini, for example, on Wednesday and Thursday she showed us how to go about getting our FNR and accuracy rates.  Overall this weeks meeting when well, but I am a little nervous about our future meeting since Dr. Natarajan and Nandini are moving to Texas next week.  We shall see how this works out, and I will keep everyone posted on how it turns out.

 

 

 

 

Reviewer Response Table

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15yuw3gk3pNCpUUrt6lGtn97gXWkWQGCGPTSifyXBTSQ/edit#gid=0

 

Link to my personal website

https://robertlongpersonalwebsite.wordpress.com/