Latest revision as of 16:27, 7 August 2017

Griffin Berlstein

Griffin is an incoming junior majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Readings

Background

Algorithmic Ethics

• Ethics of Algorithms
• Is There an Ethics of Algorithms?
• Toward an Ethics of Algorithms
• Quantifying Search Bias
• Understanding and Designing around Users' Interaction with Hidden Algorithms in Sociotechnical Systems
• The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate

Clustering and Data Science

• Algorithms for Clustering Data
• K-means Clustering in Python
• Critique and Contribute: A Practice-Based Framework for Improving Critical Data Studies and Data Science

Project Log For Summer 2017

Week One (5/30 - 6/2)

Day 1 (5/30)

• Attended REU orientation
• Obtained ID card and computer access
• Met with Dr. Guha and discussed broad ideas surrounding the project

Day 2 (5/31)

• Attended Library orientation
• Finished reading Ethics of Algorithms by Thijs Slot. This was the last of the pre-REU reading.
• Started reviewing the basics of Python
• Given crime data sets to review by Dr. Guha

Day 3 (6/1)

• Attended a meeting on proper research practices by Dr. Factor
• Set up direct deposit
• Reviewed the basics of GitHub
• Continued to review Python
• Examined crime data and the various ways it was made publically available

Day 4 (6/2)

• Moved mentor meeting to Wednesday due to scheduling issue
• Started reading background information provided by Dr. Guha
• Set up Jupyter notebook and the various dependent libraries
• Created rough implementation of K-means clustering on random data
• Obtained card access to Dr. Guha's lab
• Posted rough, pre-discussion milestones

Week Two (6/5 - 6/9)

Day 1 (6/5)

• Refined K-means implementation with the K-means++ seeding described in the Data Science Lab article
• Tested the algorithm on random Gaussian distributions, rather than random points
• Experimented with visual plotting of the algorithm using Seaborn and Matplotlib

Day 2 (6/6)

• Attended RCR training
• Finished reading the relevant sections of Algorithms for Clustering Data
• Experimented with Scikit-learn's implementation of K-means

Day 3 (6/7)

• Met with Dr. Guha and discussed the immediate future
• Set the goal to produce an interactive crime map by next Wednesday
• Gathered data from website and began sorting

Day 4 (6/8)

• Created a script to aggregate the data from multiple spreadsheets into a single usable file
• Looked into potential libraries needed to create the interactive map
• Ran into issues with the format of the data location
• Converted the addresses in the data into latitude/longitude coordinates

Day 5 (6/9)

• Found a publically available shape file of the city
• Set up the necessary scripts to display the file
• Ran into an issue with the points not being in the same coordinate system as the shape file

Week Three (6/12 - 6/16)

Day 1 (6/12)

• Fixed point plotting to align with shapefile
• Added choropleth coloring by neighborhood
• Started reading The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate

Day 2 (6/13)

• Finished The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate
• Started reading Weapons of Math Destruction
• Started implementation of website from GitHub
• Established the needed dependencies to run a local instance of Jekyll

Day 3 (6/14)

• Finished website framework
• Uploaded initial map version
• Started on the second version of the map

Day 4 (6/14)

• Split the data into multiple sets
• Used K-Means to sort in a variety of ways
• Wrote a python script to run K-Means multiple times and output results to be fed into D3

Day 5 (6/15)

• Put modified data into D3 setup for the new map
• Tweaked basic settings
• Added ability to display different variations of K-Means on the map

Week Four (6/19 - 6/23)

Day 1 (6/19)

• Tweaked the map visuals
• Added a convex hull to display the cluster borders
• Made the convex hull creation dynamic and attached to the data, rather than precomputed in the data frame

Day 2 (6/20)

• Added more visual tweaks to the map
• Added a grid to the display and fixed inaccurate axis labels
• Evaluated the relevancy and accuracy of the different clusters produced

Day 3 (6/21)

• Compared Milwaukee crime reports against produced clusters to gauge accuracy
• Read Critique and Contribute: A Practice-Based Framework for Improving Critical Data Studies and Data Science
• Met with Dr. Guha and discussed the next step in the project

Day 4 (6/22)

• Started programming a (mostly) vectorized implementation of K-Means to later modify
• Continued reading Weapons of Math Destruction
• Had the weekly working lunch and began early outlines of the mini-presentations

Day 5 (6/23)

• Fixed vectorized implementation of K-Means
• Tested implementation on random datasets and compared with the results of Sci-Kit Learn's implementation
• Implemented a geodesic distance metric using the Haversine great circle distance formula
• Modified my implementation of K-Means to use the new distance metric and build a test framework to compare clustering with the geodesic distance and Euclidean distance from the same set of starting points.

Week Five (6/26 - 6/30)

• Tested side-by-side visualizations for geodesic vs Euclidean clusterings
• Experimented with multiple methods of visualizations
• Finished reading Weapons of Math Destruction
• Gave mini-presentation
• Ran into difficulties with the public datasets on the Milwaukee website

Week Six (7/3 - 7/7)

• Got better datasets and resolved issues with publically available census data
• Overlayed demographic information on the maps
• Generated a demographic breakdown for each cluster and compared geodesic vs euclidean
• Merged functionality from different versions of the map

Weeks Seven to Nine (7/10 - 7/28)

• Failed to do logs consistently
• Finalized demographic overlay
• Implemented multiple version of a potential bias index
• Ran experiments on the data to get trends about the potential bias index
• Expanded data set to include all available years worth of data
• Geocoded all of the new data
• Expanded map functionality to include potential bias index and cluster similarity
• Added interactive graphs for demographics and potential bias
• Moved potential bias calculations to Python to allow for faster web access
• Read lots of papers for the literature review
• Wrote a rough draft of the literature review
• Created the poster for the poster session

Week Ten (7/31 - 8/4)

• Gave poster presentation
• Gave REU project presentation
• Reconfigured the maps to work with the other half of the data set
• Created more graphics for the paper
• Wrote a (very) rough draft of the discussion section
• Read a few more sources for the paper
• Minor tweaks to the map's color palette
• Departed for home