Week 1 June 3rd - June 7th
The first day was a little hectic to say the least, it started around 12:00am with the trip that was 10 hours plus 3 additional hours because one of the flights got delayed and made me miss my connection flight thats not counting the 1 hour trip from home to the airport and the 1 hour trip from the airport to my new apartment here in Blacksburg. I got to the apartment around 3:30pm. Nevertheless, the rest of the week was pretty easy going and very interesting. Interesting because I was finding my self in this different environment by my self, but thanks to the warm welcome from my mentor and my roommate that feeling came past quickly. After setting in I went to bed anxiously for the next day, my first day of work at the great Virginia Tech.
In the first day of work we got over the logistics of the job like taking out the student ID an setting up the computers as well as a brief introduction to what are we going to be working with during the summer. I will be the one working with the visualizations we plan to put up on the Virtual Town Square website, but in order to do so I have to learn a new programing language called Processing. During this week this has been the task, to get familiar and learn as much as i can to be able to use this convenient tool.
In the first day of work we got over the logistics of the job like taking out the student ID an setting up the computers as well as a brief introduction to what are we going to be working with during the summer. I will be the one working with the visualizations we plan to put up on the Virtual Town Square website, but in order to do so I have to learn a new programing language called Processing. During this week this has been the task, to get familiar and learn as much as i can to be able to use this convenient tool.
Week 2 June 10th - June 14th
In this week we continued working with the process of learning the new programing language but in a more profound way. By the end of this week we already had two "dummy" visualizations up; Mapping and Time Series. The Mapping visualization consist in representing data in a map for easier comparison, this technique can be used with one or more datasets depending in the relation with one another. In the other hand, the Time Series visualization consist in how did the data changed in a determined time set, this way creating a track record of the selected data.
I also had the opportunity to meet some people in my free time, most of them at War Memorial, that is the gym here in campus. It was interesting meeting people from all around the world including; Brazil, India, Korea, Guam, New York, and a lot of other places. I noticed that despite the different backgrounds and cultures, all of us have a number of similarities, that one might say outweighs the differences.
I also had the opportunity to meet some people in my free time, most of them at War Memorial, that is the gym here in campus. It was interesting meeting people from all around the world including; Brazil, India, Korea, Guam, New York, and a lot of other places. I noticed that despite the different backgrounds and cultures, all of us have a number of similarities, that one might say outweighs the differences.
Week 3 June 17th - June 21st
This, my third week in the program was very interesting and different from my first two weeks. In this week I had the privilege to work with another professor from the Computer Science Department of Virginia Tech, Dr. Doug Bowman. He's line of work is with Human-Computer Interactions, and is currently working on the VRC Challenge. This challenge consist in designing a humanoid robot that should be able to complete three tasks; drive a car, walk in rough terrain and connect a hose. My job in all of this was to do an Interface Analysis, observing whats wrong with the current interface or what is not as efficient as it should be and try to make it better.
Apart from this I continued on my path to fully understand the programing language of Processing which is well on it's way. I am now working on how to display data correlations in this language, by doing so new elements come into play, such as regular expressions and more.
Apart from this I continued on my path to fully understand the programing language of Processing which is well on it's way. I am now working on how to display data correlations in this language, by doing so new elements come into play, such as regular expressions and more.
Week 4 June 24th - June 28th
During this week I was working in the report of the Interface Analysis. In this report I had to list all the interface problems I could detect from the VRC runs and provide a recommendation for each one. These lists were made for each of the main tasks, rive a car, walk in rough terrain and connect a hose. One of the biggest problems presented during the runs is the unclarity of the depth, you can see this problem both in the driving task as well as in the hose task. In the driving task the process of entering the vehicle was affected greatly, because by not knowing the exact distance from the the robot and the car provoking numerous falls. As well as in previous weeks i continued with processing and began working there with Scatterplot Maps, these are used to display a number of data points given by there X- and Y-coordinate.
On Thursday 27th Dr. Barbara Ryder invited all of the CS REU students including myself to lunch so we can do some networking with the each other. Dr. Barbara Ryder is the Head of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.
On Thursday 27th Dr. Barbara Ryder invited all of the CS REU students including myself to lunch so we can do some networking with the each other. Dr. Barbara Ryder is the Head of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.
Week 5 July 1st - July 5th
This week thing got back to normal, I'm working again at McBride with Dr Perez. Continuing with my efforts to fully understand Processing I head towards hierarchical information and Tree Structures. Tree Structures store data for which each element might have several subelements. In this part of Processing thing got a little more complicated manly because of the addition of java scripts to the Processing scripts.
Week 6 July 8th - July 12th
Week 6 started with a meeting with Andrea Kavanaugh, the head of the grant for Virtual Town Square. In this meeting we discussed mainly the new interface for the web site, the work my lab mate is doing, but we did gave an over view of what we have been working during this past 5 weeks. The rest of the week was more of the same, working with Processing, all up to the end of the week. Thursday I sat with my mentor, Dr. Perez, to talk more about the specific visualizations we want to create for the Virtual Town Square website. In this meeting we decided that a Treemap visualization would come in handy. What the Treemap visualization does is count all the words and displays them in boxes, the more the word appears the bigger the box would be. An example of a Treemap created for Mark Twain's Following the Equator is presented below.
The idea is to implement this visualization to the tweets and Facebook posts located in the VTS website. The VTS website already searches for all the tweets and Facebook posts relevant to the New River Vally community. This visualization will provide a clear idea for what are the people saying without having to go through large amounts of pages and data.
The idea is to implement this visualization to the tweets and Facebook posts located in the VTS website. The VTS website already searches for all the tweets and Facebook posts relevant to the New River Vally community. This visualization will provide a clear idea for what are the people saying without having to go through large amounts of pages and data.
Week 7 July 15th - July 19th
This week we finished our first set of visualizations, these were three Treemaps. The first one presented all the "#hashtags" in one of the nine tweeter datasets we have in the VTS. The second one was of all the "@mantions'" and the third one was for all the words overall, these two are also from that first dataset. The last Treemap, the one about the words, had an extra step in comparison with the other two because since we are looking at all the words we find ourselves with what we call stop words. Stop word are all of those that really have no meaning, its simply structural. Examples of this words are: "a", "of", "the", "it", amongst others. You can see a clear example to what stop words do to a Treemap in the example presented last week, where basically all the data presented are in fact stop words.
On Thursday we had a meeting with Andrea Kavanaugh, the head of the grant for Virtual Town Square and a number of leaders from New River Vally. The purpose of this meeting was to present what was happening with the site and where are we headed. in this meeting we got great feedback about the visualization we have and we are planing to do before summer ends.
On Thursday we had a meeting with Andrea Kavanaugh, the head of the grant for Virtual Town Square and a number of leaders from New River Vally. The purpose of this meeting was to present what was happening with the site and where are we headed. in this meeting we got great feedback about the visualization we have and we are planing to do before summer ends.
Week 8 July 22nd - July 26th
By the end of this week we had our second type of visualization running. This visualization is called network graph or simple graph. The goal of the second visualization is to understand the connections between the people and their interest. This program is also intended to be used with the data from the “tweets” regarding the VTS. In this visualization there are more aspects in consideration than in our previous visualization, we are working with frequencies of appearance as well as in the Treemap visualization but also, we are relating each of them. The way we did this was with a system of nodes and edges. The nodes are “the whom, the what and the where” of the data, in other words the “#hashtags and @mentions”. The edges are the connections that indicate relation with two or more nodes. In the graph the connections are determined by the mention of it. For instance if the tweet includes #Blacksburg and #jobs there will be a connection between both nodes. With the plot produced the user will be able to understand the connections and the people and companies and organizations have as well as the demand each of one has.
Week 9 July 29th - August 2nd
This week I began to write my final draft of the technical paper. To write and polish the draft of my research paper I used the tips my mentor gave me. He recommended using series of questions to guide my writing and structure my research paper based on the answers to those guiding questions. This process involved having a set of common questions that a reader or the researcher in this case, would like to have answered. Then I understood that I had been working on it since the very first day in the program. According to my mentor, the research process is based on gathering enough information to answer this questions as detailed as possible. It basically involves answering a question that many have asked themselves, but do not get an acceptable answer. It is important to organize these questions and answers, in a way that you are not just providing people with the right answer but you are giving them enough information to get an answer for them and understand the details, or the process, that led you to reach the information gathered.
Week 10 August 5th - August 9th
This week was my last week in Virginia Tech getting everything ready to go back home and reunite with my family and friends. This week was a combination of getting everything ready to leave Blacksburg on Saturday and working on my research paper . I also continue working in the organization and structuring of the website’s final version.
In this last entry of my Journal 2011, I would like to thank my mentor at the University of New Mexico: Dr. Dorian Arnold and the Program Directors, Professors Amato, Anderson, Hirschberg and Gini, for the opportunity to expand my skill-set and explore one of the different options available out there that I could pursue, when I finish my undergraduate degree. I really recommend the Program to any other undergraduate students out there that are interested in expand their knowledge and have a great professional and personal experience.
In this last entry of my Journal 2011, I would like to thank my mentor at the University of New Mexico: Dr. Dorian Arnold and the Program Directors, Professors Amato, Anderson, Hirschberg and Gini, for the opportunity to expand my skill-set and explore one of the different options available out there that I could pursue, when I finish my undergraduate degree. I really recommend the Program to any other undergraduate students out there that are interested in expand their knowledge and have a great professional and personal experience.