CS371p Spring 2022: Jonathan Randall

What did you do this past week?

  • Data Mining
    • We looked at detecting anomalies via a variety of unsupervised methods: statistical (my favorite because the math is very straight-forward), density-based, clustering-based, proximity-based, isolation forests, and one-class SVMs.
    • I attended a guest lecture from a data analyst working at Pennybacker Capital, an Austin-based hedge fund. She described the various roles available in the data mining pipeline, and the role of software engineers being to deploy models. She also described some cool use cases:
      • Predicting lease renewal among tenants
      • Finding cities most similar to Austin, in terms of variables relevant to real estate
        • I am curious as to what approach she used. Clustering-based approaches seem logical.
  • Big Data
    • I had to correct my Page Rank with GraphFrames code. The project only wanted us to perform Page Rank on a tiny dataset. We wasted time running our code on a huge dataset!
  • OOP
    • I’ve been chugging away on Darwin! So far, everything seems to be working smoothly with the implicit UML diagram in my brain. I hope to finish my design, make sure I pass test cases, and then I hope to refactor to reduce as much inter-object data transfer as possible.
    • There are 2 areas I plan to experiment with:
      • Instruction design.
      • Marking Creatures as “updated” after Darwin has already told them to update that turn. I currently have the Creature storing this information.

What’s in your way?

I have an exam in Data Mining.

What will you do next week?

I will finish Darwin.

What did you think of Paper 11. More getters and setters?

The author’s argument was persuasive.

What was your experience of std::queue, std::priority_queue, std::set, and friends? (this question will vary, week to week)

I used a list as a queue way back in Voting. I still haven’t used any container adapters in code. But, I appreciate their design. Containment all the way!

What made you happy this week?

This Saturday, I went to the “Sherwood Forest” fair. One observation: many attendees use the renaissance faire as an opportunity to cosplay off-theme. I saw many people in full fursuits (it was really hot outside), and a couple Narutos.

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

My pick-of-the-week is Github Pages! I helped a friend of mine set up a single-page static site. It’s definitely the way to go if you don’t want to worry about hosting or deployment. You can visit his site here.

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