Summer Hangouts: Professor Shane Jensen and Professor Eleni Katifori

• Urban Analytics in Philadelphia: How can we use data to improve our cities?  - Professor Shane Jensen, Department of Statistics, The Wharton School.
• Leaf Fingerprinting: applying  persistence homology and data driven discovery to the  network of plant leaf veins - Professor Eleni Katifori, Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The summer 2019 hangout is intended for undergraduate students whose summer research involves quantitative analysis of datasets, including variants of machine learning. The research project could be in the humanities, social sciences or natural sciences. As part of SAS’s initiative in data science, we have set up a resource that we hope will be interactive and stimulating for you. Once a week, from 12-5pm, the Collaborative Classroom in the Weigle Information Commons at the Van Pelt library will be available to you to hang out, work collaboratively, learn about research by students in other departments, and listen to talks on data science from your peers and faculty.

We will provide pizza for lunch to start the afternoon, and cookies for a break at 3:30pm. Typically there will be talks from 12:30-1:30pm, and a tutorial on the basics of data science from 1:30-2:30pm. The rest of the time is largely open for you to use as you wish. We can help you set up activities including hack sessions on topics such as data visualization and machine learning tools. 

The classroom room has tables for joint work and walls you can use to write on and project from each table. The space around the room has “data diner booths" for informal discussions and study rooms for group work.