DREU 2017
DREU 2017
Surina Puri
My experiences from CRA-W's (Computing Research Association-Women's)
DREU Program (Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates)

ABOUT ME

Surina Puri

Georgia Institute of Technology

Hi! I am Surina Puri. I am a fourth year computer science major at Georgia Tech. I will be graduating in May 2018. My research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning and their applications in various fields, especially healthcare. During summer 2017, I am participating in CSE REU at Washinton University in St. Louis through CRA-W's DREU program.

ABOUT MY MENTOR

Dr. Alvitta Ottley

Washington Univeristy in St. Louis

Dr. Ottley's REU Group

My mentor is Dr. Alvitta Ottley. She is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Ottley's current research interests include information visualization, human-computer interaction and visual analytics. Previously funded by NSF and U.S. Army, her research pursues areas such as learning and modeling user behavior, individual differences, and personalized health risk communication. Her work has been published in leading conferences and journals such as CHI, InfoVis, VAST and TVCG.


Dr. Ottley's Website

RESEARCH PROJECT

Predictive Visualization

A Data Modeling Approach to Predict Users' Interests With Visualization Systems



Fig: Visual Interface used in our user study

  • Visualizations help tackle a class of problems that neither the computer nor the human can solve on their own. The computer performs complex computations and displays a visual representation of the data so that the human can reason and make judgments. However, the computer's role is typically limited once the data is displayed.

  • Our research aims to further support the human by predicting their interactions with a visual interface. In our research, we will be developing an algorithm that uses clustering to create models of the data. We will analyze users’ interations to identify the data cluster that best represents users’ interactions or interest.

  • To evaluate the algorithm, we will be conducting an online user study and recording users’ mouse clicks as they interact with a crime map. Users’ mouse clicks will be analyzed using our algorithms to predict what features of crime (type, regions etc.) the users are interested in. This research lays the foundation for developing interfaces that would adapt to assist the users in their tasks and thus create predictive visualizations.

FINAL REPORT

WEEKLY REPORT

Weekly entries about my work, learnings, findings, results and REU experience.

05/30/2017 Week 01: CSE REU BootCamp

06/05/2017 Week 02: Designing The User Study

06/12/2017 Week 03: Developing Platform For Data Collection

06/19/2017 Week 04: Integrating Visulization and Data Storage With The Online Data Collection Platform

06/26/2017 Week 05: Switching Gears To Machine Learning - Clustering

07/03/2017 Week 06: Time To Develop A New Algorithm!

07/10/2017 Week 07: Preprocessing Users' Input Data

07/17/2017 Week 08: Improving the Algorithm

07/24/2017 Week 09: Time To Test: Evaluating The Algorithm

07/31/2017 Week 10: CSE REU WashU Symposium 2017

CONTACT

I would love to hear from you

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

spuri9@gatech.edu