Since moving, my commute is along Gainesville’s back streets running perpendicular to main roads. It’s quiet if a bit ponderous but there are an enormous number of people who run red lights at the cross streets. Cellphoners, lemon sqeezers, delivery people, I see at least 2 a week and I only make 10 trips to and from work.

So I bought a dash cam and installed it this weekend. For your entertainment this Tuesday (note it took 2 days to capture my first) here is today’s red light runner.

I’ll work in putting up a gallery :)

@GainesvillePD

First frame when the light turned green and they’re barely even at the stop line and traveling full speed.

Finally exiting the intersection 3 seconds later.

Hurricane Irma was forcast to hit Miami and work it’s way up the whole state. A lot of people decided to leave and there wasn’t really any place to go except north. I live in Gainesville, right on one of the two north-south interstates in the state - I75. Our city runs traffic cameras and the make current images available on a SmartTraffic site. A few months ago I wrote a script to pull all the images once a minute so I have a history of all the “current” images.

I thought it would be fun to stich them together to make a time-lapse video of the interstate. I started it around Sept 1 so you can see normal traffic, the evacuation rush starts around 9/6, and it runs up until the traffic system crashed at 1:45 am on Monday morning which is about 15 minutes after the peak winds were forcast to hit.

Video on Youtube:

Some details about how this was made:

• The I75 cameras are movable with 4 pre-programmed positions. They take one picture per minute so there’s one image about every 4 minutes. You’ll also see some times when the camera didn’t properly return to it’s pre-programmed position.
• The orientation of the camera isn’t saved in the image metadata (who would have thought that would be useful!) but it is displayed in the image. I OCR’ed the orientation from a crop in the image with pyocr and tesseract. It was pretty good but you’ll see some stray images from other positions where the OCR messed up. I’m not a tesseract wizard.
• There are gaps in the images for a number of reasons. Sometimes the camera goes out. Sometimes the images are partial downloads since I’m pulling a jpg off a web server every minute and they’re uploading to the same file name every minute. I get about 5% corrupt or partial files.
• The final image is just the last image uploaded off the camera before it died. It just happened to be in the right orientation so for the last 2 days I was pulling the same image of their web site. Its all a hack.

So far I have download ~40 cameras worth of data since February 2017 every minute for a total of about 750 GB and 16 million images. Not sure what else I’ll do with them.

And here it is almost a year since my last post but I now have something worthwhile again. Below is my application essay for the Industrial and Systems Engineering department’s Patterson award at UF. I felt it was a good summary of what I’ve done over the course of my studies at the University of Florida on my way to finishing my Masters’s in Industrial Engineering.

As a non-traditional student, the Industrial Engineering Master’s program at the University of Florida has been a transformative experience. I took classes part time for three years and the longer time scale provided me with an opportunity to relate each class in turn to my career. It allowed time for my connection to the UF community to become much stronger by providing more opportunity to interact with multiple cohorts of students across many semesters. My degree, and the experiences it represents, have given me new opportunities in my current job and will allow me to direct my career towards my goal of doing open data science research with the biodiversity community in the future.

The Industrial Engineering master’s degree program at UF offers flexibility. After I found a new interest in data science during the operations research course, I was able to take related courses in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering department. The courses in Algorithmic Economics and Bioinformatics provided specific applications of the mathematics and statistics from the core Industrial Engineering courses. During my final semester I completed a Special Projects class supervised by Dr. Panos Pardalos. I presented my project titled “Towards Mining Whole Museum Collections Datasets for Expanding Understanding of Natural History Collections” to an audience of industrial engineering graduate students and biodiversity professionals. I truly enjoy bringing together diverse groups and helping them find where their interests overlap.

The most significant contribution I made to the UF community was helping to found the Data Science and Informatics student organization (DSI). My role in DSI has been a blend of both student-learner and advisor. My knowledge and enthusiasm towards data science was similar to the other student members and we learned as peers during workshops and joint projects. I have also been able to bring my computing, managerial, and institutional knowledge to the group in an advisory capacity. While the student officers picked the direction of the group, I provided them with techniques for hosting great events, technical infrastructure, and faculty participants for their events. Along with everyone else’s enthusiasm and hard work, my contributions have been critical to building a wildly successful data science community which has grown to more than 500 members in just one year.

After graduating this spring, I will be continuing in my current position at the Advanced Computing and Information Systems Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. After discussions with the lab’s director, I am now responsible for producing collaborations that tie the research done within our lab to research done in other domains. One of the first examples of this will be extending my final project to include collaborators from the biodiversity informatics community. We are expecting to present a platform that allows biologists to use big data analytics tools like Apache Spark on museum collections data at conferences in Berlin and Costa Rica later this year.

Here is documentation of me presenting my final project titled “Towards Mining Whole Museum Collections Datasets for Expanding Understanding of Natural History Collections”