Predicting Relative 'Cleanability' from Geometry

Mentors: Dr. Stephen Merrill and Casey O'Brien

Personal Info

My name is Anna Sisk and I am going into my senior year at Marquette University. I am majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Biological Sciences.

Orientation to the REU
Lunch with Dr. Merrill and Casey to determine project and develop a preliminary outline for the summer (Tuesday)
Two additional meeting with Casey to discuss the different tools and programs we will use, receive background references and information, and work on using Matlab (Wednesday and Friday)
Research and reading on background information: what the problem is, why it is important, how attention was brought to it, what is being done, ect.
Practicing different tools on Matlab
Setting up this wiki page

Meeting with Casey (Monday)
- received PDF and CT scan data
Continuing Matlab practice
Meeting with Casey and Dr. Merrill (Tuesday)
Graphed and plotted the PDFs for model D
- Calculated average of the 5 runs and graphed it
Read about One-Dimensional Search Methods in Introduction to Methods of Optimization
Looked into sequential and dichotomous search methods
Meeting with Casey and Dr. Merrill (Thursday)
- Discussed what to work on and how to make a poster
Attended Dr. Brylow's Talk on Good Research Talks and Papers (Thursday)
- I am now terrified of grad school
Rescale graphs, so they accurately reflect PDFs
Calculated and graphed standard deviation and variance of PDFs
Started testing for a Poisson distribution

Finished the test for a Poisson distribution
- The data does not appear to fit this distribution
Working on developing a conceptual model (traffic flow)
Meeting with Dr. Merrill and Casey (Tuesday)
- Taking the data from Casey's model and matching the mean and variance to the data from the plastic model
- Find out how long Casey's model needs to run so it matches the plastic model data
- Continue working on the conceptual model
Wrote up a summary for the conceptual model
Dr. George Corliss' talk on using LaTeX (Thursday)
Meeting with Dr. Merrill and Casey (Thursday)
- Continued to outline poster and paper
  - Talked about different titles
- Discussed conceptual model and how it can inform our thoughts on this project
- Need to come up with a definition of 'cleanability'
- Decided on goals for the next week and and outline for the rest of the summer
Drafted a preliminary outline for poster
Next steps:
- Receive data from Casey's model and determine the correct run time for his model
- Compute the sum of squares and plot it vs time
- Calculate the minimum for the function
- Fit the variance and mean of the two models
- If we are able to validate this specific model, we can then try to apply this method to other plastic models with different geometries

Continued working on poster outline
Received the simulated data from Casey
- Plotted the data
Meeting with Casey (Tuesday)
- Talked about mini presentation
- Looked and the data from the simulation and the plastic models
- Talked about interpolating the data so we can calculate the sum of squared differences (SSD)
Leaned how to interpolate data on MATLAB
Figured out how to calculate SSD (taking into consideration the plastic and simulated data have different slice sizes)
- Plotted the SSD and fitted a spline curve to it
Meeting with Casey(Thursday)
- Went over results from SSD
- Simulation parameters may need to be adjusted so the simulation data fits the plastic model data better
- Continued to talked about mini-presentation
- Explained how to create a function on MATLAB
Worked on slides and outline for mini presentation

Worked on powerpoint and talk for mini presentation
Meeting with Dr. Merrill and Casey (Tuesday)
- Talked about how to give a short research talk
- Gave update on what happened last week
- Discussed ways to get the SSD work