Leting Zhang (张乐婷)

Leting Zhang (张乐婷)

Assitant Professor @Udel

Won 2nd place in WaiDATATHON

2 minute read

Published:

Over the past weekend, I participated in a Datathon “WaiDATATHON For Sustainable Future” hosted by WaiACCELERATE & Women in AI (WAI). As a member of the Foodwizer team, I worked on the challenge “Recommending dishes based on personal nutrient needs”. This time, I implemented association rule mining on a recipe ingredients dataset. Through this analysis, I discovered the probability of the co-occurrence of ingredients in a recipe. And our global team (with Betty from Netherland and Kirthy from India) won the 2nd place of the Datathon!

This is a pretty fun weekend activity and a good chance to learn something new. For more details of the analysis, please check my Github repository

From this experience, I gained a deeper understanding of unsupervised learning. Previously, I’ve only had chance to implement the clustering type of unsupervised learning through research, but this time I got a chance to learn and use the popular association type of unsupervised learning for item categorization. Here is an introduction of the Apriori algorithm that I used.

I also learned two new tools this time. First, I am impressed with how convenient is the Amazon Web Services for data storage and peer coding. If you are interested in AWS, here is a good start. Second, all the meetings and presentations of this datathon was totally hosted in virtual reality using a software called VirBELA. As someone who has been using VR in own research, I think Verbela has high presence and has the potential to be the future of social activities. I used Hubs for social activities during Neuromatch Academy, but, in my opinion, it cannot compete with VirBELA. Using VirBELA makes me feel like getting into the Hotel del Luna from the drama under the same name.

My previous Hackathon experience was with a neuroscience team in a pre-Human Brain Mapping conference hackathon to test out the newly developed machine learning package Brianiak on human neuroimaging data. At that time, I virtually met with other researchers from the north east part of U.S.. But this time, doing all group work (i.e., coding, scripting documents, and making a presentation, as well as recording a video) with two people from two separately continents (i.e., Asia and Europe) is an extraordinary experience! Can you even imagine doing this if the time is pushed back to 10 years ago?! And most importantly, I gained two friends!

Well, since you already read here, I will let you have a peek of some of my data visualizations from the project and let my figures “sing”.

EDA

EDA2

Parallel Graph

You May Also Enjoy

Host CNLM Panel ‘How Addiction Hijacks the Brain’

1 minute read

Published:

This evening, I hosted the CNLM ambassador’s panel “How Addiction Hijacks the Brain: What Animal Models Can Tell Us About the Neurobiology of Drugs of Abuse”. This panel features four UCI addiction experts Dr. Christie Fowler, Dr. Ariana Nelson, Dr. Jessica Childs, and PhD candidate Mitchell Farrell. This is the second panel hosted by CNLM Adult Outreach Committee and we have over 60 attendees from the Irvine community. Although the audience size in summer is smaller than during the school year, I really enjoyed facilitating the panel discussion, learned about neural mechanisms underlying drug addiction, and was deeply inspired by scientists who are determined to devote their lifelong career to improving people’s mental health.

Present at OHBM 2021

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Today, I presented my work on head direction signals in the human brain at this year’s annual meeting of the organization for human brain mapping (OHBM). The conference focuses on understanding the organization of the human brain using neuroimaging methods. At this conference, I learned about new fMRI data analyses methods and different perspectives on open science and publishing.

Present at spatial@ucsb.global2021: Spatial Data Science for a Sustainable Future

less than 1 minute read

Published:

This afternoon, I gave a poster presentation of my latest findings of head direction signals in the human brain at spatial@ucsb.global2021 - the annual spatial conference hosted by the Spatial Center at UC Santa Barbara with a topic on “Spatial Data Science for a Sustainable Future”. I’m glad to share my fresh research findings with my UCSB colleagues in both geography and psychology.