Week 5

We are already halfway through the program - time is going by fast! On Monday, we wrote up another multifidelity greedy algorithm that did not allow for colocation of sensors (i.e. placing a sensor in the same location), and compared this with our other algorithm. Hugo, the postdoc working with us, also told us to reorganize and clean up our GitHub repository so it can be shared after the summer. Our repo was basically filled with mixed files all unorganized in one folder. So, we cleaned this up by separating code and files into different folders with better names (we had files named "test.copy", and others named "test.copy.copy2" - we are clearly great at naming files) making it more readable and usable for people in the future (and for us to refer back to). On Tuesday, we starting writing our abstract, which was due Friday, for the research symposium at the end of the summer. This is the symposium where all the summer programs running at NCSU will present their research. For lunch, most of us headed back to the $1 taco bus! I had four tacos and a hibiscus drink that was very refreshing in this hot weather. A bunch of us also went out for dinner that night to an Italian restaurant that offered half-priced entrees for students (only on Tuesdays)! I ordered a Chicken Rustico which is creamy chicken with ziti, spinach and peppers. It was good, and I had leftovers that I took to work for lunch the next day.

On Wednesday, we had another seminar to attend. This time we had a guest speaker, Steve Sain, who came to talk about his academic and professional career. Steve is the Senior Director and Principle Data Scientist at Jupiter Intelligence, which is a start up company that provides data and analytics services to predict and manage risks related to weather and climate change. He talked about his role in this company and the services they provide. The presentation was a pretty good mix of math and non-math topics that we could all understand. Before this position, Steve was also involved in academia, where he taught and did research at different universities, as well as worked at a national lab. He had a very impressive background, and I was intrigued to hear about his experiences and ability to try out academia, labs, and industry after graduating with his PhD. I really enjoyed this seminar and at the end, we had time for a Q&A to learn more. On Thursday, we continued testing our code and wrote a pseudocode for it, and on Friday we conducted another test between our greedy algorithm and random selection. Greedy is supposed to beat random, and these were the results we were getting, so our algorithm seemed to be working correctly! However, we did encounter a problem with our code that we spent almost the whole day trying to fix. In the end, we realized it was a simple one line mistake... After lunch on Friday, we headed to another seminar on NC State's graduate programs. We heard about their math/applied math, statistics, biomath, and data science programs. The presentations were each given by the department head and at the end we had a chance to ask questions. The stats programs stood out the most to me as well as the math. The talks were very informative and we were able to get valuable insight into their admission process and requisites. I'm super grateful to have the opportunity to learn about the grad programs and how they work, so I can be well prepared next year when I start applying. After the seminar, my group was done for the day so we headed back home. The social event this week was the Durham Bulls Game. So we all met at the Durham Food Hall for dinner at 6 and then walked over to the game. The stadium was pretty packed, and it was a good game - the Bulls won! There were also fireworks at the end which were pretty cool!

On Saturday, most of us decided to head to a local bookstore. We hit up two places that sold used books, records/vinyls and CDs. After that we went for lunch at Zaxbys - it was my first time there. It is a fast food chain that sells chicken and fries. After that, we grabbed the bus back to Wolf Village (our apartment building). Later that night, some of us met back up again in the common room to watch a movie. We watched the Joker (I have actually never seen the full movie before). I thought it was kinda more of a sad than scary movie but overall it was pretty good! Sunday was my reset day. I slept in till 10:30, made some breakfast, cleaned up my room, and then headed out for a walk. I did some shopping at Target, had lunch, and went to a coffee shop for a much needed iced coffee.

That is all I have for this week, thanks for reading!

Gaby