CS373 Fall 2019: Week 10

1. What did you do this past week?
I took a light load this week’s towards this class because I knew I would be completely busy this weekend. However, I did complete the task that was assigned to me. I was responsible for changing how the relationships were represented on our website. So, I did a bit of front-end to make a scrollable list of cards that show preview images of all of the related items on the instance pages.
Outside of this class, I also took it a bit easy. I spent the past three days working as a track marshal at the Formula 1 race in Austin! This is my third year doing so, and it was just an absolute incredible experience. I believe that everyone should take this opportunity at least once in the four years they’re in Austin to go watch the race.
2. What’s in your way?
For this class, I don’t have anything specific that is in my way again. Having finished this last phase, I think I am now just waiting to meet with my group for the next phase. I just need to catch up on the class material I missed from this past week due to being at F1.
I have not much in my way for my other classes. In virtualization, we’ve been getting a great deal of help from the maintainer of the open source project my group. My biggest blocker is just my OR project again and having to finalize meeting times with my group to put together our project.
3. What will you do next week?
For this class, I will be working hard with my group to finish phase 3 of this project. We got the work spread out amongst my group, and everyone is making progress towards the requirements. Since I took a lighter load this previous week, I hope to be more helpful this upcoming week.
For my other classes, I need to make incremental progress on the assignments as well. There is just a lot to do and not enough time. Therefore, it will be small updates on each one of these tasks until I need sacrifice time towards one project over another.
4. What was your experience of SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)?
Learning about SQL was good this week. I had known the basics of SQL from having to work on it for my lab work last semester. It was nice to get an overview again about the language. Although it is very easy to use due to its expressive nature, I do know debugging SQL can be really annoying at times. I hope we got a bit more in depth about SQL in the upcoming weeks so we can further learn about the nuances about the language.
5. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
This week’s pick-of-the-week comes from this article about efficiently developing models that identify risk scores. A common use case is determining health risks given a certain set of factors. Due to the nature of the factors and constraints that sit in developing the model it traditionally falls under the most difficult class of problems: mixed-integer-linear-nonlinear-program. These models take the longest to develop, train, or solve. As a result, the authors of this paper identified a way of using cutting planes method to linearize the objective function in order to reduce this problem to a simple mixed-integer-linear program. This significantly reduced the solution time. While optimal solutions may not be found, the cutting planes method gets very close.
F1 Highlight of the week: LEWIS HAMILTON WON HIS SIXTH DRIVERS’ CHAMPIONSHIP. I was there to witness the crowning of the champion and here is a few pictures I took (p.s. Mathew McConaughey was there too!):


