Laber Labs – Vikram K, Maddie L, Brooke W – Page 2

Laber Labs: Day 3

Today, Alex Cloud, a current NC State graduate student who works at Riot Games (the studio behind video game titles such as League of Legends and Valorant) came in to teach us about academic statistical concepts such as the difference between estimands and estimators, reinforcement learning, and luck and skill in games such as Randochess(p). He also showed us DALL-E, an artificial intelligence software developed by OpenAI that uses AI to generate digital artworks based on a prompt that is typed as an input. We got to play around and test it and it was incredible to see how the AI was capable of stitching together realistic and believable images and how it was able to understand many different prompts (that were taught by training the AI using images associated with captions). Of course, there were some shortfalls. For example, DALL-E interprets the input “tree bark” as a visual of a dog barking at a tree instead of actual tree bark, as is shown in the demo video for the software.

Shown above is an example from DALL-E’s website about how to use the software, I unfortunately don’t have any of the resulting images for the prompts we tested, however, some of the prompts we gave were “A painting of a cat by Caravaggio”, “Mario graduating from middle school”, “An Impressionist painting of Jinx from League of Legends”, and “Mona Lisa but as Zelda”!

Laber Labs | Day 2

We spent our time today learning about statistics and seeing some real-world problems involving data analysis. Some of these included deciding where to place armor on a WWII plane, determining which advertisements involve sex trafficking, how amazon decides what to show you in recommended pages for shopping, and more. We also spent time solving statistical problems. Such as where to place a hypothetical restaurant that serves inverse burritos (meat on the outside, the rest on the inside) using data from people in the area and data from restaurants.

For my visual image I took a picture of the chapel next to where we’re doing our work experience! 😀

Day 3: Laber Labs

Today we talked to Alex Cloud, who founded Doran’s Lab and now works for Riot Games as a data scientist.

Alex spoke about luck and skill used in games, using Randochess as an example. Randochess is a game in which you’ll first use a random number generator to determine whether you’ll flip a coin to see who wins or play chess. The idea here is to decide whether this game involves more luck or more skill if the numbers that correlate to flipping a coin is greater than the numbers that correlate to playing chess. Personally, I’d say that it still involves the same amount of skill, since if you’re better than chess than your opponent, you’d always have a better chance of winning.

Alex also showed us DALL-E 2, which creates art based on what the user puts in. The program was trained by feeding it a bunch of images with captions so that the program could start to identify patterns, so for example if you feed it two images with a dog in it, it’ll recognize that there are two similar animals in both images and both the captions mention a dog. However, it’s not completely perfect. An example of it not working as intended is if you feed it something like “tree bark”, to which it’ll give you an image of a dog barking at a tree rather than actual tree bark.

Laber Labs: Day 2

Today Dr. Laber gave us a presentation detailing how data analysis can be utilized to solve real-world problems such as identifying cases of human trafficking through the analysis of emojis used on websites, finding which location is the most profitable area to place a restaurant, and logically concluding when to administer certain medicines to patients with specific conditions. Additionally, we learned about the possible benefits and repercussions of personalization and discussed probability and the relationship (or lack thereof) between correlation and causation. We also brainstormed methods through which we could relate non-numerical data such as words or emojis into basic mathematical formulas.

Here’s a picture I took of the Duke Chapel, where we ate lunch nearby. Fun Fact: The style of architecture of the Duke Chapel is Collegiate Gothic, an architecture movement prominent in the late 19th century and early 20th century that was a revival of medieval Gothic architecture!

Day 2: Laber Labs

Dr. Laber gave a presentation on analyzing data and statistics to show us where it was used in the real world, such as the prime location to open a restaurant (and what factors to consider) and what data can tell us about where more armor should be placed on planes.

One the big examples he showed us was using machine learning to determine which emojis are the most used in sex trafficking cases. Since sex traffickers hide their advertisements through cryptic wording and emojis, it’s become increasingly hard to track them down, while still making their services accessible to their clients. Using machine learning, the program could identify whether someone was being trafficked/a minor or whether they were doing it out of their own will, as law enforcement prioritizes the former. We also talked about machine learning in precision medicine that determines the amount of dosage a patient should get by comparing the patient’s characteristics to those of former patients.

Laber Labs | Day 1

Today was my first day! We were designing video game levels for a future Laber Labs video game. The point of the game is to use treadmills to move zombies to volcanoes and kill them. I made a lot of levels and one of the levels I made had lots of houses and was meant to make it so you had to make lots of moves to get the zombies to the volcano. I also had the same idea as Brooke at one point and we both made heart levels at the same time haha

Laber Labs: Day 1

Today Dr. Laber introduced us to the concepts of data science, and we sprung into our first project: making a quiz! You can play the quizzes we used as a reference for this project here.

The basic idea is to have the user choose which answer option (between a notable statistician and a random object) fits the question prompt. The main purpose of this quiz is not to judge users’ accuracy but rather to share facts about the subjects of the answer choices.

The statistician we chose is David Blackwell, who we researched facts about in our brainstorming. We also worked with designers who work at Laber Labs to create artwork for our quiz.

After having lunch, we worked on designing levels for Laber Lab’s upcoming video game Zombies on Treadmills, a process involving coming up with ideas for the shape of the map and where to place spawn points for zombies, houses, volcanoes, and treadmills.

Day 1: Laber Labs

The three of us had a great first day at Laber Labs!

In the morning, we started by working on a quiz that compared a statistician to an inanimate object, with our statistician being David Blackwell and we decided on a spatula being our inanimate object, and we did research to come up with some questions for both.

In the afternoon, we created levels for a game called Zombies on Treadmills with Danny Schmidt and Sasha Chirova (two game designers at Laber Labs) and experimented with the different map sizes for levels. Some of my level designs include Pikachu and E.T. for the Atari.

Laber Labs | Day 0

Starting tomorrow (Wednesday), I’ll be beginning my work experience period at Laber Labs, led by Dr. Eric Laber. According to their website, Laber Labs is a “statistics lab dedicated to the development of practical and mathematically rigorous methodology for data-driven decision making.” I believe being able to analyze data is a skill that can prove helpful in multiple career choices, so I’m particularly excited for this work experience and to see where it takes me!

– Maddie L

p.s: Since we’ve yet to start and haven’t taken any photos yet, please take this stick figure of me waving

Day 0: Laber Labs

I’m extraordinarily grateful to Dr. Eric Laber and Laber Labs for agreeing to host us for our Work Experience Program. According to their website, Laber Labs is “a statistics lab dedicated to the development of practical and mathematically rigorous methodology for data-driven decision making”. Laber Labs has been working on many projects, including precision medicine to tailor treatment decisions based on the characteristics of each individual patient, spatio-temporal reinforcement learning to inform the management of emerging and persistent infectious diseases, and adversarial decision making to understand the decision making process of two agents whose goals are either imperfectly aligned or completely at odds. I’m excited to see what awaits me in this program.

Vikram