This week we worked on gathering the information necessary to rewrite our paper, reading the initial posts in our facebook group, and more iteration on the forum data. There’s still likely going to be more work into the weekend involving the paper for us to have a solid product to submit for peer review on Monday. We talked with Dr. Siek on Thursday about our new direction. The conversation was very informative, but added more in the way of reading for us to get done. The ARC stuff is going great so far though. The participants seem active and engaged, and are talking a bit outside of the required posting.

For the forum data I think we’ve hit a point where it’s going to take a good bit of effort to get any further. Given that we’re about to be finalizing our deliverables over these next couple of weeks, the forum data will likely end up on the backburner until the REU program is done. Essentially where we are now the machine learning in Weka has been showing promise, but the best way to improve our results is simply to have more positive examples to train on. The plan is to try to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to simulate expert qualitative codes on significantly more data, but that will require us to develop training materials and pull more forum posts, and we’re in no rush for that. The other direction that we need to explore with the forum data is natural language processing, which is an entire broad skillset that I need to take the time to bug people more knowledgeable to show me how to apply.

For the lightning talk this week I decided to talk about the content of our new paper rather than talking about the study we’re working on directly. I made this decision because it was an easy way to cut down my talk into a short span of time, and because that part of our research is the most applicable to the research interests of others, and I think would make a solid hook to get people interested in our project.

We’re a bit behind as far as the poster and video go. We have some stuff filmed already that we might incorporate, but we don’t have a clear idea as to what the structure of the video will be yet. Something to work on next week. As far as the poster goes Fernando sent us a poster to use as a template, and we’re likely going to follow that pretty closely. The big question right now is whether our paper should follow the same direction as our paper or, since posters are a bit more lax as to whether the research has to be finalized, showcase our preliminary findings from our ARC study.

We have a hard three weeks ahead, and I’m at a point currently where I’m fighting burnout. I’m going to try to take some time to myself this weekend in between working on the paper and hopefully I’ll come back refreshed and ready to tackle really trying to finalize our deliverables.