Workshops

With Dr. Gowtham

• Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2022
• Time: 9-11 a.m.
• View Dr. Gowtham's presentation slides.

About Dr. Gowtham: After earning an Engineering Physics PhD from Michigan Tech in 2007, I spent some time working as an application developer at the AT&T Research and Development HQ in Middletown, New Jersey. I returned home in 2009 as a post-doctoral fellow in Physics. Since January 2011, I have been serving as the Director of Research Computing and a Research Associate Professor with teaching, research and administrative responsibilities at Michigan Tech. I represent my University in Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC), HPC Advisory Council, XSEDE Campus Champion Program and Supercomputing Conference developing collaborations and partnerships with industry and other academic institutions to discover internship, job and funding opportunities for students and researchers.

• Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2022
• Time: 11:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

Workshop Description: This interactive workshop will demonstrate Weights & Biases, a platform for tracking, managing, and sharing machine learning experiments. It allows web-based visualization of model performance during experiments, which is easily shared with other researchers. It also offers tools to help manage data set and model versions; as well as automate the tuning of model hyperparameters. The web-based nature of it allows you to track experiments on remote machines without connecting to them, which makes sharing results easy. Weights & Balances products are completely free for academics. Visit the Weights & Balances website. 

With Dr. Irene Metz

DAY 1

• Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2022
• Time: 1:45-3 p.m.

DAY 2

• Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2022
• Time: 9-11 a.m.

View workshop materials.

Learn how computational chemistry can be used to help first-year chemistry students learn how to identify correct electron configurations, calculate ionization energies, and understand the energy differences in electron orbitals using open-source software. Wavefunction plots can also be obtained and examined, allowing students to derive relationships between quantum numbers and nodes for themselves.

Dr. Irene Metz (they/them, she/her) is a 2007 Michigan Tech Chemistry graduate who then took an unconventional route through graduate school. They completed their M.S. at the University of Iowa in 2009, only to leave to start teaching at Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, Iowa. In 2016, they returned to the University of Iowa to complete their PhD, while continuing to work full-time at Hawkeye with the goal of bringing computational chemistry into the first-year curriculum. Irene graduated with their Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2021.  They believe computational components are vital to the chemistry curriculum to help prepare students for future careers. 

With Dr. Ricardo Eiris

• Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2022
• Time: 11 a.m.-12 p.m.

Site visits or field trips have been a tool utilized by educators to engage students in active learning, assist traditional lessons, and attain stronger and deeper student learning experiences. Nevertheless, site visits present major logistical and accessibility challenges, which reduces the number of students that have access to the benefits of such a technique. The limitations for site visits have further broadened recently, as COVID-19 public health concerns have forced educators to move to online course delivery quickly and the majority of site visits have been canceled. This presentation introduces the utilization of easy-to-create and device agnostic (e.g., computers, mobile devices, head-mounted displays) web-based social spaces to deliver virtual site visits. Virtual site visits are defined as multimedia representation of a distant location that leverages computing devices for students to observe and interact with site-specific information. This presentation will provide details for: (1) Virtual site visit concepts and principles (what web-based social spaces and the science behind them); (2) Guidelines to design and develop virtual site visits using web-bases social spaces; (3) Evidence of how virtual site visits have been utilized in construction management courses.

Dr. Ricardo Eiris obtained a Ph.D. in Design, Construction, and Planning from the University of Florida in 2020. He also holds a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering (2013), a M.Sc. in Civil Engineering (2016), a M.Sc. in Construction Management (2016), and a M.Sc. in Digital Arts and Sciences (2020). His research interests focus on human-technology interaction within construction management to understand and develop human learning, problem-solving, and collaboration. He leverages new technologies to explore the research areas of human-technology interaction, real/virtual humans in mixed reality, cyberlearning, and human-computer/robot collaborations. His teaching interests are in areas of Technology Applications in Construction, Building Information Modeling (BIM), Construction Safety, and Building Utilities (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing).

• With Dr. Laura Brown
• Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2022
• Time: 12:30-2 pm

The workshop will provide an overview of several different plotting and visualization packages in Python.  Attendees will learn the basics of plotting and differences among the tools available. Attendees are expected to bring their own computer.

Dr. Laura Brown is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Michigan Technological University. Laura has a background in engineering. She received a B.S. from Swarthmore College, an M.S.E. in Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics from University of Michigan; and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. Her broad research interests are in the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining. Projects are aimed at both theoretical topics in these areas, as well as the application of techniques to other domains (e.g., clinical medicine, biology, electrical power systems, microgrids, computer systems, etc.).

Through her research activities and collaborations across campus, Laura is a member of then Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) and the Center for Agile Interconnected Microgrids(AIM). She also serves as the director of the Michigan Tech Data Science M.S. degree and graduate certificate program. Laura is the co-advisor for Women in Computing Science (WiCS).

Recently, she coordinated Michigan Tech's participation in the ACM programming competition (hosting a regional site every other year). Examples of other student activities supported include organizing a Google workshop for undergraduate computer science research, working with Summer Youth Program events, and others.