Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Happy Thanksgiving! I apologize for posting these a little late but I have been cooking food for the past three days. When I was not cooking I was reading papers about modifications to Support Vector Models to get some ideas to improve the accuracy of our predictions. Adapting Ranking SVM to Document Retrieval concentrated on a modification of the hinge loss function when training the model to increase accuracy. Training a Support Vector Machine in the Primal points out that much literature jumps right to the dual optimization aspect of SVMs and does not pay enough attention to the primal problem. A portion of the paper mentions replacing the hinge loss function with one that is differentiable such as the Huber loss function. While experimenting with SVM training I observed an interesting data point. Using NFL statistics from 2002 to 2010, one of the training methods assigned the following weights to the teams. 1.1276 Indianapolis Colts 1.1055 New England Pa

Thursday Night Football, this week the NY Jets play at Denver. The Jets have a number of players on the injured list this week. Even with those injuries all three of our algorithms picked the Jets to win on Thursday. The Jets injury list is not as bad as some of the other teams. Philadelphia's quarterback, Vick has two broken ribs and has not been at practice all week. Kansas City's quarterback Matt Cassel underwent hand surgery and will probably be out for the rest of the season. A weakness of our algorithms is that they are heavily based on this years performance to date. A major injury to an important player that may or may not have an impact of game performance is not really taken into account. That is one of the reasons we have incorporated the Line data this year. Hoping that the "Collective Intelligence" of the crowd would help to point out teams that may not perform differently. Favorite Spread Underdog Discrete

Thursday Night Football is back! The match-up for tonight features the San Diego Chargers at home vs the Oakland Raiders. This is a very close matchup according to the stats. San Diego has a offensive pass efficiency of 7.2 and Oakland 6.7. Oakland has a better run game but not by much. The defensive ratings are almost exactly the same with San Diego leading by a little bit. The SVM and Neural Network both chose San Diego to win but the PageRank algorithm decided Oakland was a better choice. Favorite Spread Underdog Discrete Pagerank At SAN 8.5 OAK SAN OAK PIT 1.5 At CIN PIT PIT At KC 5 DEN KC KC At IND 4 JAX JAX JAX At DAL 3 BUF DAL DAL HOU 7 At TB HOU HOU At CAR 6 TEN Car TEN At MIA 5 WAS MIA W

Old Dominion University has a freshmen computer science course that focuses on what it means to be a computer scientist. This course discusses career opportunities, current research being performed, and serves to debunk myths and misconceptions about the field of computer science. Such myths include: we never talk to humans, we code our entire lives away, and we are nocturnal. I was invited to be a guest lecturer for the class last night. Even though the last myth is sometimes true, I did my best to touch on each of these talking points during the presentation embedded below. Day in the Life of a Computer Scientist from Justin Brunelle The first topics I spoke about in the presentation generated the majority of questions and discussion. I spoke first about the digital preservation work being performed in the WS-DL group at ODU. This, of course, included discussing the ArchiveFacebok , Warrick , and Memento projects at a cursory level. During our discussion, we hit on th

Week 9 is the last of the bye weeks for this year. Two games that have a higher level of chatter this week and should be good games to watch are the New England vs Giants game and the Pittsburgh vs Baltimore game. The Patriots with Brady and the Giants with Manning, both have potent veteran quarterbacks and these game will probably play on the passing efficiency of both teams. The offensive passing efficiency of both teams is comparable at about 7.8 yards, however the Giants pass defense is better with only 5.9 yards given up compared to 7.5 for New England. The rhetoric for the Baltimore vs Pittsburgh game has been rather lively. The Baltimore defense is possibly one of the best this year with a pass defense of only 4.8 yards given up although the offense is has not been stellar with a pass efficiency of 5.8 yards. Pittsburgh's pass offense is better, rated at 7.02 yards while their pass defense, while still decent, is not as good as Baltimore's with a rating of 5.1 yards.

I was invited to present an overview on Agile Development to Old Dominion University 's ACM chapter . More specifically, I gave an overview of the Scrum method . My work in MITRE 's Agile Engineering department has allowed me to practice Agile methodologies in the work force. Through this presentation, I shared my experiences with the members of the ACM. Agile Engineering - ODU ACM from Justin Brunelle Agile engineering's main focus is a shift from a linear development model. The Waterfall model is the classic example of a linear process model. Agile focuses on a cyclic and adaptive model. One of the main focuses of Agile is to receive and incorporate user feedback into the development process in order to produce a better product for the user. Also, it allows the product owner to garner greater control over a project. Each cycle in Agile includes all of the traditional development steps: Requirements, Design, Implementation, Verification, and Assessment