This Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) was funded by the Computing Research Association - Women (CRA-W). The DREU program allows students to travel to new universities and conduct research with volunteering professors. This summer (2018) I, Rebekah Manweiler, traveled to the University of Wisconsin - Madison to work with Professor Nicole Beckage and her associate Professor Joe Austerweil in the field of computational modeling.
Rebekah is an undergraduate student going into her fifth and final year at the University of Kansas in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She is majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Mathematics and Linguistics and will graduate in May, 2019. Her research interests are in Psycholinguistics, Computational Modeling, Machine Learning, Language Acquisition, and the structure of the mental lexicon.
Nicole is a Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in the Department of Psychology. She specializes in Computational Modeling, specifically network analysis and cognitive models. One of her current projects focuses on modeling user interactions in the environment of GitHub, an open source software development platform.
Joe is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison in the Department of Psychology. He specializes in Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Modeling. One of his current projects focuses on modeling event interactions in the environment of GitHub.
My project for this research experience will be a small part of the larger DARPA project that my mentors are working on this summer. Their project is a DARPA Challenge to predictively model the github enviroment including the github users, repositories, and events, within a specific time frame. My project will be focused on the users and my goal is to make a descriptive model of all the users of github and their interactions (events) with repositories as well as other users. You can find a complete project description in my working lab proposal.
Final Report (updated 8/21/18)
My progress on this project can be viewed in the BLOG page along with other things happening in the Austerweil Lab and in Madison.