After my meeting with Anat at the end of my day yesterday, I had a good idea of what I had to get done in the next week. The hard part was just figuring out exactly how to do that. Mainly, today I toyed around in Access until I found a way to create SQL queries that would help me count how many runs are out for any one provider at any one time during any particular day. To do this I had to go back to some of my old notes on SQL and really plan out what information I needed and wanted to record. My real challenge was once I finished my initial work and had to start to figure out how I could automate the process to do this many times for many different days, times, and providers. Most of my afternoon was spent looking up information on macros in Access and with that also VBA code and how to use SQL code with that.
Kate Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). She also holds courtesy appointments as Adjunct Professor in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and the Information School at UW. Kate's research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. Specifically, her work seeks to understand and describe how affected people, emergency responders and remote individuals come together online, often forming emergent collaborations, to respond to major crisis events. Kate earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Technology, Media and Society and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
In this talk, I offer an overview and present early findings from a collaborative project that examines online rumoring in the context of crisis events. The project has duals goals: 1) enhancing our understanding of why and how rumors spread on Twitter after crisis events; and 2) developing methods for detecting rumors using the "collective intelligence" of the crowd. This presentation will cover our efforts in both of these regards. Additionally, I will talk about the methods that we are evolving for doing mixed-method research on "big" social data.
Also, today I got to hear a lecture over lunch by Kate Starbird. I was worried it might be boring or confusing because it might go way over my head, but she made the talk very easily understandable to the audience and I it captured my attention for the whole time, to the point where I wished it could have been longer! It reminded me a lot of a project that some of my fellow classmates at Cornell did during our "Dealing with Data" course where they tracked Twitter tweets centered around the events of Ferguson. Here is a brief summary of the content of her lecture.
One more adventure for today! Today Anat invited me to come check out some poster presentations and demos that the CSE 576 Computer Vision class had prepared. Those were super cool and I was really glad I got the opportunity to talk to some of the student's about their work. One guy in particular I talked to for quite some time because he had done his project using the PR2 robot and he had created and implemented a strategy for allowing the PR2 to recognize certain objects and choose the correct one from a given inventory. To me this was very interesting because I saw in it a lot of parallels to the work I did last summer working with our Turtlebots, and all the troubles we had with the robots inaccuracy in recognizing objects accurately enough.