MaryAnn's Blog

Welcome back to my blog. I had a wonderful relaxing break and have begun my second term at WPI. Fall also occurred suddenly in Worcester, which some of the trees on campus took quite literally. Recap of First Quarter Last term, I met and worked with both the IQP team and the graduate student mentor, Caitlin, several times a week. Our goal was to become well-acquainted with the project and start some initial designs such that we could start the second term at full speed. I am happy to say that we are all quite familiar with the topic now and have some great drafts of the user interface (please refer to the blog of my teammate, Diana, at diana.matters-creu.com ). One of the difficulties I experienced last term was the sensation of being pulled in two directions. On one side, I was working with the IQP team on cracking the LineUp code and designing the user experience. On the other, I was working one-on-one with Caitlin to define research questions upon which we could formulate a ...

Hello blog readers. As a reminder, this week I am out of school for fall break. Look forward to an extra fantastic blog post next week. Thanks, MaryAnn

Good morning blog followers. I apologize for not writing this last night per usual. I was at Grace Hopper this past week and did not have much time to work on the project. Next week I will be off for a week as my term will be coming to an end. I plan to continue working on the project, but I may not post next Monday and instead will write a long report the following week. Briefly, here's what I discussed this week with the graduate student in charge of the project. Task The goal this week is to start developing and testing one of the tools. Between the build-a-rank tool and the explain-a-rank tool, the explain tool makes more sense to me to start with. My plan is to learn about a regression version of the random forest classifier (I think it's called random regression?) and modify it to fit our needs. Here is my strategy for developing the tool. Dummy Test Cases One will be really simple, like with only one attribute. For example, the set Fruit, A1: apple, 2;...

Last week, I asked the graduate student overseeing our project about the design of the tools and whether they should be run client-side or server-side. She wisely suggested that we don't worry about that issue right now and instead focus on getting a functional site running using dummy data on the "server". I think this is still an issue we will someday have to deal with, but in the meantime we can work on building the site itself. Our Site Currently, our site has a landing page and a button to link to the visualization tool (LineUp). The following images are screenshots of the landing page: Figure 1: Top of our landing page. The bar graph is animated. Figure 2: Further down on the landing page. Notice the Visualize button which will direct to LineUp  The next step is linking LineUp to the Visualize button. Just above the part of the page in Figure 2, there is a part for selecting datasets. The user will select a dataset, then select a tool to use (e.g. Vis...