A project by Thomas Cannon and Kara MacPhaul Ants are interesting little creatures – especially when it comes to finding the optimal route to a food source. With a web of pheromones a single ant alerts others nearby where the path to the food is. The other ants will follow suit and iterate on the […]
Category: Software and Data Science
Evolutionary Algorithm for Bee Populations
Introduction: This project was started in competition for the Metis Bee Challenge on drivendata.org. The goal of the challenge was to classify different photos of bees into their respective genus — honey bee, or bumble bee. The challengers were given thousands of test and training images to naively classify the 200 x 200 pixel images. training images […]
GRB Lightcurve Clustering
Abstract: We present a new method for categorizing and finding Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRB’s) with similar light curves from the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), onboard NASA’s Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO). Using χ2 values as ’similarity distances’ from any two respective GRBs’ 64ms light curves, we compare every GRB to every other GRB through a […]
Exoplanet Detection with Bayesian Blocks
Abstract: Discovery of exoplanets is important for understanding our place in the universe. One fruitful method for locating exoplanets is by the measurement of the drop in flux of the planet’s host star when the planet passes between the observer and the star – also known as transiting. The light-curves produced by planets transiting in […]
Phylogeographic Analysis
Abstract: The three-lined salamander, Eurycea guttolineata, is a wide-ranging lungless salamander in the southeastern United States. We have sampled seventy-seven populations spanning the entire distribution of the three-lined salamander. We have amplified, purified, and sequenced 872 base pairs of the mitochondrial gene Cty-b and used this data to reconstruct the evolutionary history of three-lined salamanders. […]