{"id":27656,"date":"2016-04-07T21:41:29","date_gmt":"2016-04-08T01:41:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=27656"},"modified":"2016-07-19T11:23:46","modified_gmt":"2016-07-19T15:23:46","slug":"undergraduate-presents-computer-science-research-at-prestigious-sigsce-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2016\/undergraduate-presents-computer-science-research-at-prestigious-sigsce-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Undergraduate presents computer science research at prestigious SIGSCE conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) senior Alex Bender presented in the Student Research Competition at this year\u2019s Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, popularly known as SIGCSE. The annual event, held this year in Memphis March 2-5, draws many of the top scientists in the field.<\/p>\n

Bender, a senior computer science<\/a> major from Sarasota, Florida, presented a research poster titled \u201cAn Evaluation of Cluster 3.0 as a General Tool for Principal Component Analysis.\u201d Professor Dee Weikle<\/a>, who advised Bender on the project, says that he is only one of two students to have work accepted to the prestigious venue since she\u2019s been at EMU. The other student was Aaron Springer, a 2013 graduate who is currently earning his doctorate at the University of Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

\u201cAaron\u2019s work was completed during a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates, so this could be the first work that was actually done at EMU to be presented at SIGCSE,\u201d Weikle said.<\/p>\n

Developed criteria for choosing software<\/h3>\n

Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Bender says, is a way for a researcher to take a very large data set and reduce it to a much smaller set of data points that represent the most important parts of the data. That, in turn, makes understanding and drawing analyses or conclusions from the data much simpler.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy research led me to discover that in many computer science or computer architecture research papers where PCA is utilized, the reasoning and explanation for how or why PCA was used were inconsistent at best and nonexistent at worst,\u201d Bender says. \u201cWe also knew that PCA had uses\u2014and was being used\u2014outside the pure mathematical or computer science-related fields.\u201d<\/p>\n

If a researcher wanted to utilize PCA for research purposes, Bender concluded that \u201cit would be useful to create a general set of criteria for choosing software that implemented PCA well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bender developed six key criteria against which to judge potential software. The criteria included whether it was an open-source program; descriptive, clear documentation; data compatibility to ensure correct processing; built-in assumption testing; built-in graphical tools to allow for clear depictions; and the ability to sufficiently process large amounts of data.<\/p>\n

In his tests with the software program Cluster 3.0, Bender found that it passed four of the six criteria and had \u201creasonable ways to cope\u201d with the shortcomings in the other two criteria, thus deeming the software viable for PCA implementation in scientific experiments.<\/p>\n

Bender\u2019s presentation at SIGSCE was a big step from last semester\u2019s STEM Student Research Symposium<\/a>, where he\u2019d presented the PCA-related portion of a research project that he\u2019d completed with Samuel Miller on the ripening process of noni fruit.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt being my first time talking about research\u00a0at all<\/em>, much less in front of a crowd, I felt reasonably good about our presentation,\u201d Bender says. \u201cIt definitely helped prepare me to talk to the judges and interested participants at SIGCSE.\u201d<\/p>\n

Research began with independent study<\/h3>\n

Bender\u2019s intensive work with PCA began during his junior year, when he took an independent study with Weikle based around PCA\u2019s theory and underlying mathematics along with some computer architecture. After the study ended, Bender says they decided to continue the research to work toward a tangible result. That extended into the summer, when Bender was invited to attend EMU\u2019s Kairos Place<\/a>, an annual event where faculty, staff and graduate students can work on research, writing and creative projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a fascinating experience seeing all the different avenues of research, and different people\u2019s processes in their work, and seeing interactions between scholars and teachers that I may otherwise never have gotten to witness,\u201d Bender says. \u201cKairos was the point of clarification, where Dee and I worked out more clearly what the goal of our research would be.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduation, Bender says he plans to work for a few years in software development to gain experience and refine his research interests before pursuing graduate school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) senior Alex Bender presented in the Student Research Competition at this year\u2019s Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, popularly known as SIGCSE. ... read more about Undergraduate presents computer science research at prestigious SIGSCE conference<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4515,13808,14139],"tags":[15926,6795],"feature":[],"class_list":["post-27656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-computer-science","category-student-profiles","tag-dee-weikle","tag-diversity"],"yoast_head":"\nUndergraduate presents computer science research at prestigious SIGSCE conference - EMU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2016\/undergraduate-presents-computer-science-research-at-prestigious-sigsce-conference\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Undergraduate presents computer science research at prestigious SIGSCE conference - 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