User:RBrennan
From REU@MU
Contents
Overview of Schedule
| Week | Tasks | Deliverables |
|---|---|---|
| Week 0 (6/1 - 6/3) | REU Introduction and Bootcamps
Defining schedule, milestones, and goals |
|
| Week 1 (6/3 - 6/10) | Researching existing solutions | Milestones + Goals (due Fri. 6/4) |
| Week 2 (6/10 - 6/17) | Define research problem
Brainstorm solutions |
|
| Week 3 (6/17 - 6/24) | Research and review Dr. Perouli’s work
Define solution path and implementation steps |
|
| Week 4 (6/24 - 7/1) | Start implementation of solution
Put together presentation (Most likely 1 day max) |
Mini Presentations (Wed. 6/30) |
| Week 5 (7/1 - 7/8) | Implementation and refinement | |
| Week 6 (7/8 - 7/15) | Implementation and refinement | |
| Week 7 (7/15 - 7/22) | Test implementation with real data set | |
| Week 8 (7/22 - 7/29) | Finish Project
Work on research deliverables |
|
| Week 9 (7/29 - 8/6) | Finishing Research Deliverables | Formal Presentations (Thu.-Fri. 8/6-8/7)
Research Poster (Thu. 8/6) Research Paper (Fri. 8/7) |
Devote some time every day to formalizing and logging research:
- Summaries of what I’m working on for wiki
- Challenges I’m facing, paths I didn’t take
- Findings and results
- Annotated Bibliography
- Anything else I will forget about when it comes time to work on deliverables
Devote at least half an hour each day to emails, scheduling, and other logistics
2021 Weekly Logs
Week 0 (6/1 - 6/3)
Thursday 5/27
- Met with Dr. Perouli
- Introduced the project
- Discussed first steps
- Discussed goals for the project
Tuesday 6/1
- Attended REU introductions and data science bootcamp
Wednesday 6/2
- Attended data science bootcamp
Thursday 6/3 (morning)
- Attended Good Research Practices Talk with Dr. Brylow
- Outlined milestone and goals for research
- Research ways to characterize sets of multidimensional data
- Determine the best way to do this for concept maps
- Create executable code for the direction we’ve determined is the best
- Create cohesive research deliverables on this topic
- Outlined broad schedule for first 3 weeks
Week 1 (6/3 - 6/10)
Thursday 6/3 (afternoon)
- Met with Dr. Perouli
- Adjusted and finished overview of schedule
- Talked over what previous research I should be looking into
- Discussed the overarching problem I'm looking into
- Created wiki and added schedule
Friday 6/4
- Interviewed Abby Brennan about learning measurement deliverables
- Created thought maps to hone in on research topic
- "Visualizing a group's understanding of a concept"
- File:Brennan ResearchTopic Thought Maps.pdf
Monday 6/7
- Attended Responsible Conduct of Research session
Tuesday 6/8
- Researching other visual representations of understanding
- Researching alternate solutions
- Scoring concept maps
- Representing understanding through artwork
Wednesday 6/9
- Attended technical writing presentation
- Completed session 1 of CITI modules
- Researched more alternate solutions
- Categorized and outlined alternate solutions File:BrennanAlternateSolutions.pdf
- Wrote out questions to be answered for project justification File:BrennanQuestions.pdf
Thursday 6/10 (morning)
- Completed sessions 2 and 3 of CITI Modules
- Scheduled plan and wrote questions for meeting with Dr. Perouli
Week 2 (6/10 - 6/17)
Thursday 6/10 (afternoon)
- Meeting with Dr. Perouli
- Went over work done in week 1
- Discussed my research so far and areas to look further into
- Discussed questions I thought of yesterday
- Discussed goals for week 2
- Looked further into concept map scoring
Friday 6/11
- Researched alternate solutions further and wrote up summaries of relation to project
- Scoring concept maps
- Assessing understanding with machine learning
- Outlined answers for questions posed earlier
Monday 6/14
- Weekly Python coding practice
- Researched ML solutions
Tuesday 6/15
- Organized references in BibTex file
- Wrote annotations for references
Wednesday 6/16
- Finished alternate solutions slides
- Broke it down into Drawbacks, Benefits, and Maturity of the Field
- Added slide for collective concept maps
- Started researching concept map tools
- Listed requirements (wants/needs)
Thursday 6/17 (morning)
- Write-ups for concept map tools
- FreeMind
- MindMup
- Outlined notes for meeting with Dr. Perouli
Week 3 (6/17 - 6/24)
Thursday 6/17 (afternoon)
- Met With Dr. Perouli
- Discussed my work over the last week
- Discussed Plans for upcoming week
- Read through Dr. Perouli's work on collective concept maps
- Read through reviews of the paper
- Researched concept mapping tools
- Focused on file formatting of each application
Friday 6/18
- Outlined program steps from individual maps being created to outputting collective map
- Biggest challenges will be clustering the concepts, stylizing, and creating cluster diagrams (not as necessary)
- Finished write ups for concept mapping tools
- Decided on using CMap
- tested writing sample concept map as propositions and importing to CMap
- Works, but links are forced to have names and positioning of nodes is messy
- most likely have to import tan export again as cxl to fix those things (as well as any style changes)
- Worked on ways to make the map readable
- Some progress but will likely have to revisit this problem later, will have to research minimum crossing number algorithms
Monday 6/21
- Created object types for program
- Concept
- Connection
- Cluster
- ClusterConnection
- Wrote functions to import a folder of .cxl files and convert them to a list of concept and connection objects
Tuesday 6/22
- Broke down steps of program into to-do lists
- Wrote new object classes
- Map
- Cluster
- ClusterConnection
- Node (superclass for Concept and Cluster)
- Moved importing code from its own class to Map class
- Wrote print functions for each list in Map class
- Minor code improvements
Wednesday 6/23
- Started to research solutions for clustering problem
- Attended REU check-in and guest lecture
- Continued coding
- Added function for creating ClusterConnections
- Added functions for tallying Clusters and ClusterConnections
- Annotated existing code
- More minor changes and improvements
Thursday 6/24 (morning)
- Planned meeting with Dr. Perouli
- Edited research slides
Week 4 (6/24 - 7/1)
Thursday 6/24 (afternoon)
- Meeting with Dr. Perouli
- Discussed and asked questions about collective concept map paper
- Discussed concept mapping software choices
- Discussed methods for clustering nodes
- Wrote up more ideas for clustering nodes that came out of meeting
- Instructor Drag and Drop
- Instructor Connect Concepts
- Looked more into pros and cons of yEd and CMap
- yEd file format still very unusable
- yEd can organize nodes in a much better way than CMap
- With inspiration from yEd's circular organization, I think I can create methods to place and organize nodes in the .cxl file
Friday 6/25
- Worked on ideas for a clustering algorithm based on connections
- Relies heavily on nodes and connections being featured in multiple maps
- Probably works best in large groups
- In smaller groups, it would more likely be very star-shaped
