CS371p Spring 2022: Jonathan Randall

What did you do this past week?

I had a fairly productive week.

  • Data Mining
    • We looked at hierarchical clustering algorithms.
  • Big Data
    • We implemented a Page Rank algorithm using GraphFrames.
    • The creator of Spark and founder of DataBricks gave a talk to our class. I still don’t understand their business model, but I’m glad Matei was able to capitalize off his familiarity with an open-sourced framework (which he wrote, of course).
  • OOP
    • I finished the Allocator project. I did this one individually; I’m curious as to what other possible solutions there might be for this problem. I imagine this project, of all projects, will have the most similar set of solutions. I felt as if there was only ever an obvious way of doing things, which ending up working. The HackerRank tests missed some edge cases.

I attended a seminar on “AI for Accurate and Fair Imaging” given by Alex Dimakis. I hope to get around to actually reading the paper, because the architecture they developed was interesting!

What’s in your way?

I am behind in Data Mining.

What will you do next week?

One day at a time! I will be working on a Data Mining project.

What did you think of Paper 10. Why getter and setter methods are evil?

The author’s argument was persuasive: Getter and setter methods as indicative of weak, not-very-object-oriented design.

What was your experience of std::vector, std::deque, std::list, and std::stack? (this question will vary, week to week)

I dived into learning about the STL’s data structures when solving Voting. However, I always thought a deque being a doubly-ended queue implied it was a doubly-ended linked list. Little did I know!

What made you happy this week?

I went to the “Cidercade”. I went to a comedy show.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is the city of Austin’s Open Data Portal. I’ve used it to look into the maintenance history of my rental, parks & recreation info, and I’ll be using it for my next data mining project.

In their book “The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism “, Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen claimed that the country which had the highest-quality and most abundant sociological data (and the most helpful public sector data aggregators) is the United States. This is surprising, especially considering how mediocre the United States performs in many direct comparisons with other countries. Anyway, perhaps Austin could be the “United States” of world cities when it comes to publicly-accessible data!

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