Lucy Simko ’11 is spending this summer at Tufts University, working with Dr. Carla Brodley and two teammates on a research project through the Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. The DREU program aims its programs at underrepresented groups in computing and engineering.
A week into her research, Lucy reports: “We’re developing a web crawler to essentially put together [the DREU program’s] mailing list for next year. This may sound trivial, but it actually touches upon a lot of open questions, such as how to find websites of only computer scientists without going through the entire web, or what words are most likely to tell us that a website belongs to a certain demographic (such as student, female, and/or minority). We’re also interested in the machine learning aspect of the problem: that is, since the machine must be taught how to classify websites based on some training set, what should the training set include, and how should it be acquired”
Good luck, Lucy!