TDA, Recorded for Poster(ity)

Seven down, three to go. And boy are they going. As we sprint to the finish of our summer research term, final presentations of our work begin to loom. This week entailed some R and TDA work, but the main focus was beginning to structure our talks and posters that we are to present in a matter of weeks. We are going to be attending the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium on August 10th to present a joint poster, and on the 16th, we have our Lawrence University presentations to give, in the form of talks. Thus, we have been honing our PowerPoint and poster making abilities, from graphic and animation use, to phrasing important and complex topics in as few words as possible while still getting the information across. In addition, because we are attending the AGU conference in December, we also have been improving our ability to communicate our work in different language and contexts for difference audiences.

As far as TDA work is concerned, this week has been somewhat of a bottleneck. We are beginning to look at multiple variables at once and more interesting variables, and have nailed down a promising method of 3D density clustering. However, we still lack the ability to recolor the data points in a 3D plot in accordance with their corresponding tree branch, which would enable us to focus in on particular regions of data for further analysis (surfaces, simplices, etc.). So, once we are able to get past this barrier, many exciting and informative work can be conducted. Until then, we will be working tirelessly and flexing our problem-solving muscles. In summary, the light at the end of the tunnel is visible, and once we get over the impediment that is this recoloring issue, we'll be free to bathe ourselves in the glow of TDA's full potential.