Last week I started my OCDSSS summer research internship. During the opening festivities they strongly encouraged us to keep a personal diary and to note things down that we did week by week, so that when we came to do our final poster presentation we wouldn’t be stuck trying to remember what happened during the project. I figured that I may as well put it on my blog since I’d be writing it anyway, and I’d like to have it available for posterity. So now that the first two weeks are finished I actually have enough to say, let’s get it started
We started last week, on Tuesday morning, by meeting in the Guinness Storehouse, where we met all the other interns and our project supervisors. We also got a number of presentations from people like Microsoft, NDRC, and UCD’s Clique Research cluster. It was an enjoyable day and I’m glad I got a chance to meet all the other interns (there’s about 34 of us in total I believe) before we all got split up. It’s a very multinational group, by my guess it would be about 60% Irish, 40% non-Irish.
On Wednesday morning the UCD students all met at CSI:UCD and we we’re split into two groups. Most were to given space in the 4th year/Post-grad lab in CSI, and 6 of us we’re sent off to CASL (The Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory). My researcher is based in CASL so I was one of the lucky 6 who got to move there. The rest of the day was spent getting to grips with the building, getting to know each other, and claiming our desks. We got our keycards for the building and met our supervisors properly for the first time. We were given a group of desks and a computer each on the 3rd floor. Unfortunately theres about 20-30 PC’s constantly running in the corner as part of a cluster) that somebody has setup which tends to heat up the room. But its a nice space with a couple of couches for us to relax on.
There’s 6 of us at those desks on the 3rd floor and we’re all getting along well. We’re still getting to know each other, but they’re all nice guys. We’re trying to organise a weekly football game at the moment, just to get everyone together to hang out in a non-work context.
Thursday was when people started getting to work. I was just reading research paper after research paper, trying to get up to speed with what people had done previously, as well as building up a picture of what lay ahead. It was tough going but I got through a fair few (see below). The maths heavy ones nearly killed me, but I enjoyed it. It got me thinking about the problem in different ways, which I suppose was the point of all that reading.
Friday was much similar, I started off by reading more and more papers. But by lunch my mind was starting to melt and I got a hankering for some coding, so I decided to take a break and after lunch to come back and do a bit of coding. I spent the afternoon switching between reading papers and exploring some of the coding that I’d be doing in the project. I’ve decided to use Ruby as much as possible since I’m really liking it at the moment. It also seems to be ideal for the kinds of things that I’ll be using it for during this project.
Unfortunately I had to miss a group walk to Bray Head on Saturday morning. That was because I was given too little notice and I already had plans.
So that was my first week. It was interesting and it was a nice start to the internship… I’m looking forward to the rest.
I’ve decided to take plenty of photos during the course of this internship, and I’ll be posting them up on Flickr (Again for posterity)
N.B.
I’m not sure what the legality is of putting the papers up on my site for you to download, so I’m going to side-step that entire minefield by just providing a list of most of the papers I read over the course of Thursday and Friday. UCD has a subscription to various journals, so I got all of these for free, but a quick search on Google Scholar should yield you some results.
- A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia
- Evaluating Authoritative Sources using Social Networks/ an insight from Wikipedia
- GraphRank/ Statistical Modeling and Mining of Significant Subgraphs in the Feature Space
- Modeling User Reputation in Wikis
- Network Analysis of Collaboration Structure in Wikipedia
- Spam Graph Talk
- Us vs. Them/ Understanding Social Dynamics in Wikipedia with Revert Graph Visualizations