About Olivia

“Please see window for assistance”

A graduate student at UCSD, enjoying all the sun, sand, and graph theory that San Diego has to offer.

ICDM 2015 Recap Part II: Sampling

In a previous post I summarized some of the plenary talks from the most recent ICDM held in Atlantic city. In this follow up, I will discuss some of the ideas from sessions.

In the main conference track, there were sessions spanning over many of today’s trending topics in computer science: Big Data, social network mining, clustering, spatio­-temporal and multi­label learning, classification, dimensionality reduction, and online and social learning. The approaches and applications varied from session to session and talk to talk, but there was, naturally, an overarching theme of efficiently and effectively working with data.

Continue reading

ICDM 2015 Recap

This week I had the honor of attending and presenting at ICDM.

The conference was hosted in Atlantic City, NJ, at Bally’s Hotel and Casino on the boardwalk. It was certainly an interesting choice for an academic conference venue. Though I myself grew up just a few hours north of Atlantic City, and now live about four hours from Las Vegas, I’ve never really indulged in the delights of “gaming,” as the conference program referred to it. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I must say that it was a lot of fun to wander through the casino during session breaks or at the end of the day. The boardwalk itself was a lot of fun (and impressively recovered after Sandy), and not to mention the big outlet mall and Aquarium which was the destination of a group excursion during the second day of the Conference. The organizers did a great job of pulling together a diverse conference in a less-than-conventional place; I think everyone had a great time. Continue reading

Providing feedback in the classroom

In my previous post, I discussed some current and ongoing research on effective pedagogical approaches to STEM education. The problems in STEM education have gained much attention recently due to the growing gap between demand and skill in American STEM jobs, likely due at least in part to lack of interest or discouragement among American students. Continue reading