UGRiD stands for “Undergraduate Researchers Interested in Data”. It’s a group that consists of Five College students from cross-interdisciplinary backgrounds who have an interest in Data Science. We host collaborative data analysis sessions that include educational presentations on topics like machine learning, data visualization tools, and telling stories with your data. We hope to have meetings split evenly between education and collaboration, and want to foster an environment where members can be free to work and present on whatever data-related topics they find most interesting. We will also be hosting workshops and guest lecturers here on campus. We have Sunday Meetings from 3-5PM at the W.E.B DuBois Library (Room 1667)

In preparation of this weekend’s Five College DataFest, we’ve put together some resources to help participants prepare.

Come hear about the latest research from UMass Applied Math MS students Connor Amorin, Gabriel P. Andrade, Chris Brissette, Matthew Gagnon, Brandon Iles, Jimmy Smith, and Lance Wrobel in the second of our research talk series! At a high level, this exciting project at the intersection of math, computer science, and computational biology involves designing a robotic agent capable of processing both biological and environmental stimuli to perform some pre-specified task at the optimal time, using statistical/machine learning techniques from computer vision, signal processing, time series analysis, and more. Applications include factory production line optimization and artificial limbs to help the disabled, as well as many more.

To help everyone prepare for DataFest, we’ve put together some resources for today’s meeting that will hopefully give you a good sense of why DataFest is worth participating in, and how to actually approach analyzing such a large dataset once it does happen. For today’s meeting, we will be working with a housing prices dataset from Kaggle, which you can download here.

If you are interested in referencing the slides used for our talk on data visualization today, or want to get more info on how to create interactive graphs in R, check out the following links!