Today we tackled trying to understand a classifier, in particular, LibSVM. The “beginner’s guide” on their website involved astroparticle physics as a section, to give you an idea of how that went. Still, some progress was made and soon we will have to do feature selection for the general/specific classification, at least for a trial run. This has been your update for the day.
The next prompt I shall answer is thus: “Discuss how teamwork in your CSC courses at Berea have influenced your internship experience.” I am under the impression that Ani hasn’t expected us to work together as much, as she seemed surprised at our meeting yesterday. It also seems that Wenli and Lily do not have much experience programming with others, but I’m quite used to it at this point. Another undergrad in the lab who is not on our team (apparently named Lawrence), came over and asked in wonderment how we were managing to get anything done sharing the keyboard between us. He said he’d probably hog the keyboard, but it was working well for us.
Wenli didn’t have any experience with Python, and while I wrote several parts of the script, I didn’t understand Linux at all, so Lily was more or less queen of the keyboard. We all contributed through discussion, however, and I think it was beneficial and contribution was pretty evenly spread between us. It was really fun to bounce around ideas and try to draw things out on paper when we got confused about our layers of data structures (of which there were many). Programming with others takes so much longer, but I believe better ideas come out of it as long as everyone is invested, as we have been. Working together in these situations is more fun, as well. (:
mintformatics 