Software Tools

Processing Videos in Python with OpenCV

November 28, 2023
Leah Lee
by Leah Lee. Videos and images are quickly becoming the most common type of data we store and interact with. Computer vision technologies derive useful information from these forms of data and are now commonly used in health care, agriculture, transportation, and security. OpenCV is a powerful tool for image processing and computer vision tasks. In this blog post, we will explore how we can use OpenCV in Python to carry out basic computer vision tasks. Specifically, we’ll focus on the simple task of identifying an object from a video and labeling a frame with a box around the object.

Hugh Kadhem

Data Science Fellow
Mathematics

Hugh Kadhem is a Ph.D. student in Applied Mathematics, with broad research interests in computational quantum physics and high-performance scientific computing.

Mapping Census Data with tidycensus

November 6, 2023
Alex Ramiller
by Alex Ramiller. The U.S. Census Bureau provides a rich source of publicly available data for a wide variety of research applications. However, the traditional process of downloading these data from the census website is slow, cumbersome, and inefficient. The R package “tidycensus” provides researchers with a tool to overcome these challenges, enabling a streamlined process to quickly downloading numerous datasets directly from the census API (Application Programming Interface). This blog post provides a basic workflow for the use of the tidycensus package, from installing the package and identifying variables to efficiently downloading and mapping census data.

Introduction to Item Response Theory

October 24, 2023
Mingfeng Xue
by Mingfeng Xue. Measurements (e.g., tests, surveys, questionnaires) are inevitably involved with various sources of errors. Among many psychometric theories, item response theory stands out for its capability of detailed analyses at the item level and its potential to reduce some of the measurement errors. This post first discussed the limitations of conventional summation and average, which give rise to the IRT models, and then introduced a basic form of the Rasch model, including expressions of the model, the assumptions underlying it, some of its advantages, and software packages. Some codes are also provided.

Python Deep Learning: Parts 1-2

November 13, 2023, 2:00pm
The goal of this workshop is to build intuition for deep learning by building, training, and testing models in Python. Rather than a theory-centered approach, we will evaluate deep learning models through empirical results.

Bash + Git: Introduction

October 24, 2023, 9:00am
This workshop will start by introducing you to navigating your computer’s file system and basic Bash commands to remove the fear of working with the command line and to give you the confidence to use it to increase your productivity. And then working with Git, a powerful tool for keeping track of changes you make to the files in a project.

R Geospatial Fundamentals: Vector Data, Parts 1-2

November 7, 2023, 9:00am
Geospatial data are an important component of data visualization and analysis in the social sciences, humanities, and elsewhere. The R programming language is a great platform for exploring these data and integrating them into your research. This workshop focuses on fundamental operations for reading, writing, manipulating and mapping vector data, which encodes location as points, lines and polygons.

R Data Visualization

November 20, 2023, 9:00am
This workshop will provide an introduction to graphics in R with ggplot2. Participants will learn how to construct, customize, and export a variety of plot types in order to visualize relationships in data. We will also explore the basic grammar of graphics, including the aesthetics and geometry layers, adding statistics, transforming scales, and coloring or panelling by groups. You will learn how to make histograms, boxplots, scatterplots, lineplots, and heatmaps as well as how to make compound figures.

R Data Wrangling and Manipulation: Parts 1-2

November 7, 2023, 2:00pm
It is said that 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing the data for exploration, visualization, and analysis. This R workshop will introduce the dplyr and tidyr packages to make data wrangling and manipulation easier. Participants will learn how to use these packages to subset and reshape data sets, do calculations across groups of data, clean data, and other useful tasks.

Lauren Chambers

Consulting Drop-In Hours: Wed 1pm-3pm

Consulting Areas: Python, R, HTML / CSS, APIs, Data Manipulation and Cleaning, Data Science, Data Visualization, Python Programming, R Programming, Software Tools, Web Scraping, Regression Analysis, Software Output Interpretation, Bash or Command Line, Git or Github, OCR, RStudio

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