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Showing posts from February, 2023

2023-02-26: Animating Changes in Webpages, Featuring George Santos's Biography

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Figure 1: The Wayback Machine "Changes" tool showing the difference between George Santos's biography on December 19, 2022 and February 3, 2023. Deletions are highlighted in yellow and additions are highlighted in blue. Source:  https://web.archive.org/web/diff/20221219173515/20230203162225/https://georgeforny.com/about/ The Washington Post recently published the article, " See the evolution of lies in George Santos's campaign biography ." George Santos is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 118th U.S. Congress. He has steadily removed claims from his website that have been proven to be false, such as holding a bachelor's degree from Baruch College. In the Washington Post article, the journalists used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to find and view previous versions of his webpage that included the false claims. To show change over time, they interspersed colored text boxes with the change text throughout the article. Previo

2023-01-31: Nithiya Venkatraman - PhD Computer Science

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I am Nithiya Venkatraman, Senior Software Engineer at ADP , Norfolk and a part-time PhD student at Old Dominion University . I have 10+ years of IT experience (Oracle PL/SQL, Java, OAF Framework, Unix). I started my career with a start up firm MRR Private Ltd, Chennai, India as a Junior Developer (2009). I have also worked with Mastek , Mumbai as a Software Engineer for around two years, then moved back to Chennai to work with Photon Infotech as a Senior Database Administrator in 2012. This was destiny, where I met my soulmate, and it was time for us to start a family; we moved to Boston, USA. It was a totally different world out there. We were blessed with a handsome baby boy in the year 2016. Then I had to stay at home to take care of him for the next couple of years.   In 2018, I resumed my career as Database Developer for the client Moody’s corporation at New York, while my family was here in Virginia Beach. Later, after few months of struggle, I got a job opportunity as Applica

2023-02-25: Brian Hanson, Jr. (Computer Science Ph.D. Student Intro!)

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"Hello! Welcome to my introductory blog!" My name is Brian Hanson, Jr., and I enrolled as a doctoral student at Old Dominion University in the Spring of 2022 as a G-RISE Scholar under the direct co-supervision of Drs. Gymama Slaughter and Sampath Jayarathna . I am excited to undertake the study of biomedical research using machine learning and data analytics for the enhancement of wearable medical devices! My research interests include blood glucose prediction, machine learning, physiological models, and assistive technology for healthcare. Summer 2015 Meyerhoff Scholars 27th Cohort Summer Bridge Closing Ceremony My undergraduate background is interdisciplinary, with exposure primarily to Information Systems but as well Computer Engineering. At the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) , I enrolled as a Meyerhoff Scholar of the 27th cohort in the Fall of 2015 with ambitions of obtaining the highest degree possible in academia, a Doctor of Philosophy. Thankfully i

2023-02-15: Paper Summary "The nature of consciousness in the visually deprived brain"

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How we portray and engage with the world around us is fundamentally influenced by our sense of vision. The visual area is located in about one-third of the cortical surface of the primates. Vision loss, either at birth or much later in life, affects how we perceive the world. It is intriguing to know how the brain of sighted and blind individuals differ. In the  paper  "The nature of consciousness in the visually deprived brain," the authors  Ron Kupers ,  Pietro Pietrini ,  Emiliano Ricciardi , and  Maurice Ptito  discuss various topics pertaining to the nature of consciousness in those without vision. This research answered an important question: What can we learn about the functional development of the human brain in physiological conditions by studying blindness?    (Source:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00019 ) There are some findings from research on animals as well as from psychophysical and functional brain imaging studies that give us insights. The brain normal

2023-02-06: New Kid in Town: ChatGPT

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Recently, OpenAI launched ChatGPT , an extremely powerful language model chatbot that can answer complex questions in a conversational manner. It has become the talk of the town since its release. ChatGPT is everywhere! The New York Times reported that Google's existence could be threatened by ChatGPT for its playfulness and efficiency to give direct answers to any question. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/12/28/what-does-chatgpt-really-mean-for-businesses/?sh=407c5fa87d1e GPT is a large transformer-based language model developed by OpenAI that has been trained on a diverse dataset of texts, including books, articles, and websites, in order to learn the structure and style of natural language. It has achieved state-of-the-art performance on a number of natural language processing tasks, including language translation, language generation, and text summarization. ChatGPT was fine-tuned on top of GPT-3.5 using supervised learning as well as reinforcement lea