Like many people around the world, I have been spending the last few weeks at home pouring hours into Nintendo’s newest hit game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In what the New York Times describe as “The Game for the Coronavirus Moment,” players take up the role of a human who moves to a deserted island to start a new town alongside their anthropomorphic animal neighbors.
Since the early days of the COVID-19 crisis (the past few months!), the spatial and temporal enormity of the situation has been tellingly conveyed in mapped data visualizations.
We like to say that the D-Lab is graduate student-driven because it is! By this we mean the majority of our staff are graduate students (although we are lucky to have some intrepid undergrads, well, amazing postdoctoral researchers, and faculty on our team as well.) In 2019 D-Lab introduced a new Data Science Fellows program as a way to include more graduate students in the D-Lab community.
After more than two weeks following the shelter in place guidelines, I have developed some sort of a routine. That is the only way I can get myself to do any work. As a graduate student, I feel the pressure to be productive even in the middle of a pandemic. My most productive hours usually occur between 7am and 2pm. I have never tried to understand why that is the case. However, since being confined to my apartment, I have been unable to work at the same level of efficiency even during my golden hours.
How many thousands of machine learning applications have been developed and gone to market in recent years? Feeding vast amounts of data into software to make decisions for us is a social paradigm the 21st century is embracing to the fullest.
Many of us were already using our phones for the majority of our waking hours, but during the current shelter-in-place-measures, digital technology has become more important than ever.
When I was in college I took an introductory programming class and promptly forgot 95% of what I learned. Most of the topics of the homework or coding challenges involved in the class were on topics unrelated to my primary area of interest (language data) and the skills did not seem transferable. My research would never rely on animating a face, so how was it useful?
A project that uses many tools that are taught at the D-Lab, and on which I’m excited to be working with students, focuses on exploring the city of Oakland, CA through spatial data.
Why do I find this interesting?
One project that I’ve been working on with a student (CS major, ERG minor) is the exploration of environmental justice and transportation in the City of Oakland, CA.
