Earlier this month I participated in the American Museum of Natural History’s annual hackathon (see my last post for details about the event overall). During the hackathon, I worked with Katy Abbott, another Helen Fellow at the museum with me, to use a machine learning algorithm called DBSCAN to tackle our challenge. This post explains the process we used to complete the first step of the challenge: estimating the percent weights of elements in a meteorite.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to participate in my first ever hackathon: the #HackTheSolarSystem hackathon hosted by the American Museum of Natural History.
What is a hackathon, anyways? This is a question I got asked countless times this last week as I informed my friends and family that I would be at work all weekend (yes, including Friday night, yes, including Saturday night, no, I will not be able to socialize at all).