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The Journey of a Lifetime...

June 4th~ Monday
Today was an awesome day. I got to meet my mentors Lori Pollock, Emily Gibson, and David Shepherd. It was a little nerve wrecking at first not knowing anyone and not knowing anything about the research topic. Professor Pollock gave me an overview of the natural language program analysis project and a small idea of how my project will fit into the big picture. Emily gave me a breakdown of the different ideas they had and what portion I would be focusing on. The nervousness faded once I had a better idea of what I am dealing with, but it also helps that the people I'm working with realize I do not know everything! I have learned so much already and spent most of the day getting my logins, passwords, etcetera to access the server, necessary programs and start working on my DMP website using HTML on Linux. So far there is a lot of progress and I look forward to what the rest of the week will bring!

June 6th~Wednesday
Yesterday and today have been very productive days! I haven't started messing with much of the functionality with the Eclipse program beyond doing test runs and seeing how the program handles the different stop words. Some of the scripts made to handle stop words more efficiently have not been given to me. The reason being is they want me to take the code and the NLP process apart and realize what it is doing, understanding why it executes that way, and what can be improved.

I am just getting my feet wet, so I'm trying to navigate and manipulate the different tools in Eclipse and get a better idea of what the role and relevance of stop words are for the NLP. Also, on the side I am playing around with HTML and making the GUI look better for my website. Everything has been from scratch, but I'm learning a lot more about how to code in HTML, which has been enjoyable as well.

The last interesting project is just simply reading material dealing with the NLPA process. I have selected documents that I read, review, and discuss with my mentors. They said I am on the right track, so these past two days have been amazing! Look forward to finding out more about this program!

June 8th~Friday
Today was interesting. I had some issues with taking in all the information, but my mentors feel that I have the jist of it. I am moving from reading about the project to seeing a little bit more of the action. I am becoming more familiarized with Eclipse (which honestly that in itself is a project, lol) There are several applications, but for now I am just looking at the ones pertinent to the research. This weekend will hopefully be beneficial, I am going to revamp and also have printed portions of code to gain a better understanding of extracting words and other smaller applications. The code is a bit over my head, but we'll see how it goes! Until next time!

June 11th~Monday
So, I got to meet with Emily today about the questions I had on the code I printed off last week and it went really well! She broke down some of the algorithm concepts and Perl regular expressions I was struggling to understand. I am going to try to pick up some Perl while I go through the code, right now its simple regular expressions, but I am told there will be other references that I will need to recognize. Thankfully Perl is not to hard to understand so that is actually going pretty well, still slower than I want it to go, but its a start.

Its getting down to crunch time as Emily wants me to look at the code and do searches for stop words and verify with code and reasoning why those would or would not be stop words to a programmer. This sounds easy, but it really is kind of tricky. So I have some work cut out for me! Luckily, I will be able to step back from the code today to sit in on David Shepherd and Zak Fry give their preliminary presentation to prepare for the conference in San Diego where Dr. Pollock, Emily, Dave, and Zak will give and overview of their NLPA.

I am a little nervous about tomorrow because I have to show my results to Emily of why I think the stop words are or are not stop words. There are still some fuzzy areas for me, and honestly it is reminding me a lot of fuzzy logic. So I might be able to use some of the applications from my course this past semester and put it to work to possibly define my own mini program for the stop words. We'll see, maybe if I have extra time this week I will play around with that. However, don't be fooled I am far from being the best programmer! I am just trying to learn more about the Java data structures used in the NLPA. So, I am doing my own little extra research! Its worth it though and I am seeing some things fall into place that I just couldn't seem to understand during my previous courses in Java. I'm hitting some road bumps, but I'm confident that things will smooth out more as I am studying the extra textbooks that have been given to me.

June 13th~Wednesday
Yesterday went surprisingly well! Emily was pleased with my word results and was glad to see that I unknowing, realized not every word on the stop word list belongs there (I was really scared at first because I could find cases where words could be considered relevant and irrelevant to debugging a program)! She said I even used a new approach that she had not previously thought of, which made me feel good for the simple fact that I am actually making a contribution to her project and others! I am a step closer to my goal guys!!!! WOOT WOOT!!!! Not only that, but we even found a different way to approach finding stop words which makes it more of a challenge, but also more interesting! In more exciting news, Emily, Dave, and Zak left for San Diego yesterday and will give their presentation today! Praying that goes well!

Today, was slightly frustraing! Emily set up the account on the Linux box before she left so that I could access all the files I needed to analyze the stop word lists and I had gotten far. When I got in today the computers had rebooted themselves and the account she set up, obviously was not there. So without her passwords, I couldn't get do anything with the stop word lists. To not waste time I have been reading some of the textbooks she gave me that will help in understanding the program more. Also, I tweeked my site a little and look forward to making more cool changes tomorrow. Until then I am reading textbooks and articles, and trying to see how much I can pick up on Perl. *Sigh*, back to work!