November 7, 2024

EagleEye

A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff

Denhere Presents at Joint Mathematics Meetings

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Melody Denhere, assistant professor of mathematics,  presented her work “Rank Estimation for the Functional Linear Model” in a session on Probability and Statistics at the Joint Mathematics Meetings which were held in San Antonio, Texas from Jan. 10 – 13. This work was a collaboration with Huybrechts Bindele from the University of South Alabama.

Earlier, Denhere also attended the 2014 Blackwell-Tapia Conference held in Los Angeles, California from Nov. 14 – 15. The conference and prize honors David Blackwell and Richard Tapia (who won the National Medal of Science in 2010), two seminal figures who inspired a generation of African-American, Native American and Latino/Latina students to pursue careers in mathematics. At the conference, Denhere presented a poster on work she carried out with her student, Victoria Moore, during the summer through the Jepson Summer Science Institute.

Taking on Twitter

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Is it a human or a Twitter bot?

Researchers from the University of Mary Washington and the Naval Surface Warfare Center want to know for sure.

UMW computer science majors Bryan Holster and Chris Zimmerman, under the guidance of Professor Stephen Davies, have teamed with scientists at the center’s Dahlgren division to get to the bottom of this sometimes perplexing social media mystery. The partnership is one of several ongoing collaborations between the University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

UMW Students and Faculty Collaborate with Dahlgren Researchers

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Eight University of Mary Washington students have received hands-on guidance this semester from mentors at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren. The students shared the results of their undergraduate research projects during poster presentations on Wednesday, April 30 at UMW’s Dahlgren campus. UMW professors Debra Hydorn, Melody Denhere and Stephen Davies collaborated with the students and mentors on four projects:
  • Statistical modeling and analysis of counts in time – using social network data, students Kim Hildebrand and Candice Benshaw analyzed the number of Twitter messages sent within a county in the U.S. during a given hour.
  • Simulation of a social network graph – students Cody Reibsome and Benjamin Blalock established a model of the collection of individuals that a member follows and the collection of individuals who are followers on Twitter.
  • String edit distance for micro-blogging text – in order to follow trends on Twitter there is a need to be able to account for misspellings. Students Jonathan Blauvelt and Anthony Bell used a distance measure to determine the similarity of tweets.
  • Citation prediction and analysis – students William Etcho and Josiah Neuberger explored methodologies for predicting the number of citations a paper or patent receives or for identifying emerging technologies.
For more information about the projects, contact Hydorn at dhydorn@umw.edu.

Denhere Presents at Joint Mathematics Meetings, Serves as Poster Judge

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On Jan. 15, 2014, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Melody Denhere gave the presentation “Robust Penalized Functional Logistic Regression” at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Baltimore, Md. This paper is continuing work from her doctoral dissertation and was coauthored by Nedret Billor, her dissertation adviser at Auburn. Dr. Denhere also served as a judge for the annual Student Poster Competition at the Joint Meetings.