Schedule and Updates

By the end of this week will have met with Dr. LaToza and Sahar four times in order to discuss the project and try to narrow the scope of the project. Our goal is to have a concrete idea of both the general workflow of the new tool and the method by which the tool works by the middle of next week. Emily and I are splitting our time between learning JavaScript and reading papers on previous work done in our area of research.

Week #2 (06/10-06/14)

We have met with Dr. LaToza and Sahar another three times this week to discuss our project. Our next meeting will be the coming Monday. Our current goal is to explore what tools and assessments have been made about what information can be gleaned about developers and developer activity from environments like IDEs. We are also examining examples of design rule segments and what kinds and how much information we would need to be able to deduce that segment. As we do this, we are to continue to learn JavaScript.

Week #3 (06/17-06/21)

We met with Dr. LaToza and Sahar twice this week to discuss our project. A couple of our team members will be in and out of town for the remainder of the week, so chances are that our meeting Wednesday is our last one. We are currently investigating details that will help us figure out important details about what kinds of information we can and should supply our algorithm, what kinds of algorithms we might consider, and how to maximize the efficiency of the the different components. Additionally, we had our weekly large group meeting with all of the individuals researching under Dr. LaToza. During this meeting we got to present our research and receive feedback and questions regarding our presentation.

Week #4 (06/24-06/28)

This week has been a bit of a whirlwind! I was out of town Tuesday, but we still met with Dr. LaToza and Sahar three times this week. We have decided to focus on using association rule mining algorithms in order to find patterns in the code. Of particular interest is the FP-tree and other related algorithms. We have read several papers this week about association rule mining and have explored different implementations of these algorithms that other researchers have produced. We are also considering how to represent different elements of a design rule in a database on which the association rule algorithm would be run. We will continue this avenue of research into next week as we search for the best algorithm for our purpose.

Week #5 & #6 (07/01-07/05; 07/08-07/12)

These past two weeks have been consumed in creating scripts to mine the code and create the database so that we can run the association rule mining algorithm and find associations between attributes. We continue to update our paper and are actively working to have at least the algorithmic end of this project completed by the end of the summer. By the beginning of next week, we should have an idea of what adjustments we need to make to our refined algorithm and data mining/creating process. Dr. LaToza has been out of town for Week #6, so our next in-person meeting will be Monday.

Week #7 (07/15-07/19)

This week we have largely been working on trying to figure out what kinds of attributes are most likely to help us find the rules we wish to find. We are on our third iteration of the types of attributes we are outputting. We are also actively working on the video presentation that is due next week as well as preparing for our poster and presentation. We should also work on updating our paper, although currently we are largely consumed in trying to adjust the attributes we are outputting and our algorithm. In the coming week, we will focus on finishing the video and preparing for the presentation early, so that we might have more time to make our poster and update our paper.

Week # 8 - #10 (07/22-07/26; 07/29-08/02; 08/05-08/09)

The last three weeks were a whirlwind, and I forgot to update this section, so... the brief overview is that we prepared and turned in a video of our project, a poster, powerpoint presentation, and sample paper for the REU while meeting weekly deadlines with Dr. LaToza. The last several weeks have all been fine tuning the algorithm, and adjusting the attributes that are output. Week 10 ends in a poster presentation and all the challenges of packing up and moving out once again!