Team:Wellesley HCI/Notebook/NicoleNotebook
From 2012.igem.org
Nicole's Notebook
May 29: (Day 1) First day of the summer session!
Research started today, so a majority of the day was dedicated to administrative details about the program. Otherwise, Veronica and I were assigned to research more about semantic search--what it was, its benefits, and whether or not it would be worthwhile to pursue this field in the context of synthetic biology. We will be presenting our findings near the beginning of June.
May 30: (Day 2)
For the majority of the day, I was learning how to code with C# on a Windows 8 Surface. It was easy to get lost on the more technical side and details of the coding, especially because the instructions seemed to assume you knew about the basic commands in C#. Other than that, it was easier to delve into the code without blindly copying down if it had been my first time. There were a couple of times where getting stuck and being unable to figure out the problem because of my lack of knowledge got frustrating, but because it was my first experience creating code to manipulate objects on a touch screen, I found the learning experience to be pretty amazing overall. Otherwise, I’ve been doing more reading on synthetic biology. It took me a while to read them since I hadn’t taken up Biology since the ninth grade, but I found the idea of engineering a new biological function interesting so I managed to complete most of the reading.
May 31: (Day 3)
I continued reading more about Semantic Search and its advantages compared to other types of searches as well as its disadvantages along with exploring different semantic search engines that are already available on the web, specifically for bioinformatic research (e.g. [http://bio2rdf.org], [http://distilbio.com], and [http://nlmplus.com]). A couple of papers also introduced me to the idea of incorporating other types of searches in Semantic Search. I learned a bit more about text mining, natural language processing (NLP), and ontology.
June 4: (Day 5)
June 5: (Day 6)
Jun 6: (Day 7) A day in the wet lab
MIT reflection goes here
June 7: (Day 8)
June 8: (Day 9)
June 11: (Day 10)
June 12: (Day 11) A day in the wet lab
BU day!
Jun 13 & 14: (Day 12 & 13) Brainstorming!!
Brainstorming reflection goes here