CS371p Spring 2022: Jonathan Randall

What did you do this past week?

  • Data Mining
    • My project group is working to predict outcomes for animals in the Austin Animal Services system, based on their features upon intake. The data exploration phase let us in on a weird fact: many bats get into the system at AAS. And, Austin prides itself on being a “no-kill” city meaning that euthanasia is considered a bad outcome for cats and dogs. However, many bats are euthanized. This is probably because very few people can adopt bats, but it’s still sad.
  • Big Data
    • My group worked on performing a machine learning task in a distributed fashion using PyTorch’s “Distributed Data Parallel” module. We also successfuly used Torchserve to provide an API for classifying images.
  • OOP
    • We did many exercises this week. We talked about “Life.”

What’s in your way?

Life. The project, and in general. I need to plan for graduation as well.

What will you do next week?

Next week, I will start on “Life.” I haven’t looked at the specifications, but I can imagine reusing some code from Darwin. We will have to use inheritance for this project, so I hope to read up on abstract classes and virtual functions in C++.

What did you think of Paper 13. What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You?

I remember this paper from a previous semester. It is upsetting how pervasive sex-based discrimination and harassment is in academia and the tech sector. The paper is a reminder that it is not enough to be a bystander; we must actively promote inclusion and equity. Of course, this applies to all stakeholders in software development, from our coworkers, to our supervisors, to customers and to society in general.

What was your experience of r-value references, move constructor, and move assignment? (this question will vary, week to week)

I am curious as to how the “move” function works under-the-hood, but this would likely require looking at various compiler implemenations. Perhaps that is the best way to truly understand C++. After all, when I parse code now, I am guessing as to what a compiler would do. My guesses are getting better over time. But to truly understand C++, I must become the compiler.

What made you happy this week?

I attended my friend’s thesis presentation. Another friend from Chicago visited. It’s been great!

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

My tip of the week is Data Mining-related. I have enjoyed using Pandas get_dummies() function to one-hot-encode variables. I prefer it over sklearn functions such as Label Binarizer or the One Hot Encode module, since Pandas allows you to easily label and prefix column names with the original column.

Headshot