| By Dylan Fontaine | When creating a data visualization, it is often necessary to emphasize certain points so that they stand out from their surroundings. Doing so can help the author communicate their intended message to the viewer quickly and clearly. For example, I made the point for Chicago a red star on the scatterplot…
Computers can compose music…but can they write scripture?
| By Jeff Parker | I was so impressed to learn from a peer that computer programs have been written to compose music. Music is widely considered an art that takes innately human abilities to craft pleasing sounds. Computers are dull and inanimate while music is alive and human. I do not have a musical background,…
Special Session: US Senators on Twitter
| By Dustin Fontaine | Social media plays a huge role in modern day politics. Through social media, politicians can instantly share their ideas and opinions with millions of people around the world. Social media posts do not have to pass through a middleman (i.e. a journalist or news-anchor…potential sources of bias), before reaching their…
Round Peg for a Square Hole: City Blocks vs. Hexagons
Jeff Parker Driving to the O’Hare airport in Chicago, it takes a whopping 1 hour and 15 minutes to travel a mere 8 miles from my wife’s work. The fastest route zig-zags through the suburbs on streets of various sizes and directions. We travel west and south, inevitably hitting every traffic light at every intersection.…
Simple College Football Rankings System
| By Macon McLean | With intense rivalries and unparalleled upsets, college football is a sport like no other. As an avowed fan, I find each Saturday is more exciting than the last, as the postseason picture becomes clearer with each passing week. All teams are fighting for bowl games, and for the especially talented…
K-means Shouldn’t Be Our Only Choice
Ethen Liu All the Python code associated with this blog post is on my GitHub account for those whose wish to follow along, dive deeper or modify it for their own needs. [K-means] and [Gaussian Mixture Model] K-means Clustering algorthims are a typical example of unsupervised clustering. Its task is to gathering similar samples (we’ll…
Classifying images with style
Dr. Ellick Chan Recent research has shown that popular computer vision algorithms can struggle with recognizing certain types of stylized or artistic photos posted on services such as Instagram because they alter key properties of the image such as color, shape, texture, and other informative features needed for accurate recognition. MSiA students Kapil Bhatt, Ke…
MSiA students use a Deep Fried RestauraNet to classify food images
Dr. Ellick Chan MSiA students Jen Kung, Rene Li, Kedi Wu, and Luyao Yang satisfied deep cravings for understanding food and restaurant images using Deep Learning and took home the second-place prize at the Deep Learning and Data Visualization Poster Session. The team used a sophisticated analytics technology called Deep Learning to extract information out of restaurant…
MSiA students create music by TUNE-ing a deep learning neural network
Dr. Ellick Chan MSiA students Kate Overstreet, Alyssa Everding, Patty Lu and Kelsey DeMott took home the grand prize in the Deep Learning and Data Visualization Poster Session. The team used a sophisticated analytics technology called Deep Learning to generate original musical lyrics by teaching the computer to read thousands of songs and learn the…
Wiki Loops: Visualizing Patterns in Wikipedia Links
Jamie Green What’s the difference between NASCAR and philosophy? According to xkcd’s Randall Munroe, only 5 Wikipedia pages. Randall Munroe, a former NASA astronaut-turned-web cartoonist, is best known for his humorous takes on subjects ranging from math and science to love and poetry. His primary outlet, www.xkcd.com, pulls in an estimated 2.8 million views per…