Day 3…we are finally feeling at home! With each day, comes more comfort not only in the environment but with the people all around us (all of which are absolutely incredible). This morning we arrived to SAS Hall around 10:15am and met Ana-Maria Staicu, another statistics professor and executive in the statistics department. Coincidentally, her son played tennis with Luke so they happened to already know each other. Mrs. Staicu told us about how she got into statistics from being a very mathematics focused person, and how the applications of statistics can literally never get boring. Originally from Romania, she followed in others footsteps in coming to the United States for her final degree. She walked us through many different papers she had written and different research she had done, showing us various graphs, data sets, and write-ups about past projects. Her favorite project is one which she was in the middle of working on right at this moment, as she said it is the project with the most potential to be implemented onto a larger national scale. This particular project was analyzing the statistics in forearm muscles to create a bionic arm for amputees which can function as close to a human hand as possible. Also showing us her other projects such as those including pigs, mental health, and marathoning (go running!), we got to look into why she loves her job and is never bored with analyzing statistics. Following our discussion with her we went back to the BOM where we met Eric, a graduate student from Connecticut who has been religiously working on a project involving the video game Madden since the day we arrived. In the BOM on at least three computer screens and three TV screens Madden will run continuously without stopping. He talked to us about the meaning of reinforcement learning and how that is what was going on, these monitors had been running the program and game of Madden for several months now already without stopping. Ultimately, they were finding a way to have a computer play a game of Madden with a higher win-probability than that which the computer already comes programmed with. They were able to manipulate the game and predict probabilities of various plays to create the optimal setting. Following a lunch break, we were released earlier compared to other days and will be learning how to use a specific program we had to download onto our computers tomorrow!
