Georg Ruß' PhD Blog — R, clustering, regression, all on spatial data, hence it's:

Dezember 30th, 2008

Sammon’s mapping for visualization

While everyone else is at home, I rode to work and implemented Sammon’s mapping on two of the agriculture data sets. The data set descriptions are in the paper I presented at the SGAI. One of the sets has three farming strategies, the other one just two. I decided to apply the dimensionality reduction of Sammon’s mapping and it turns out that it works quite well for both of the data sets, although the interpretation is much easier for the second one. For starters, here are the plots:

Sammon\'s mapping F330 data setSammon\'s mapping F131 data set
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Dezember 9th, 2008

Report from FAIRS’08

It’s been a long time since the last post. Same procedure as every year: once the winter term starts, the teaching stress starts again. About two weeks into the term I caught an RSI syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury) that prevented me from any typing, mousing and writing activities. It certainly feels better now, but I was given advice by three doctors to not overuse my hands any more, otherwise it would get worse than last time and surgery would be needed. I’m more or less confined to reading literature and taking some notes, as the pain usually returns after a short while of typing.

Nevertheless, I’m in Cambridge, England, at the moment. Yesterday I took part in the FAIRS’08 workshop, which was held at the same location as last year. There were about 20-25 PhD AI research students and seven to ten experienced (seasoned) experts for giving guidance along the PhD path. The best presentation was certainly given by Max Bramer, followed closely by Frans Coenen. Further scholars were Adrian Hopgood, Simon Thompson, Miltos Petridis, among others. Many thanks to Alice Kerly who perfectly organised the full forum day.

I gave my presentation on what I’m planning to do in my PhD, too. It raised some interdisciplinarity issues, i.e. I will have to take care that I’ll be doing a computer science PhD, not an agriculture PhD. At least my motivation was quite clear — I’m interested in my topic and it’s fun working on it. My slides are here:slides-2008fairs

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