Kristin Branson @kristinmbranson@qoto.org

While we're all very divided in the US right now, I wanted to say that my experience from 6-8am at Potomac Falls High School polling location was that everyone was very kind to each other. They seemed happy to be there to try to do what they thought would make the country better, and were appreciative that their neighbors were doing the same. Sorry for being saccharine, but participating in our elections always makes me a bit hopeful, and I wanted to share my hope.

@csdashm I suspect it would work pretty well! Our flies are not super interesting looking, since they're back-lit. We've been working on trajectory generation (that's what I'm playing with now), and we had considered directly doing video generation instead, but I decided that I didn't really care if our flies looked like flies, just that they moved like flies. I wonder if we have enough data that you could just sample -- like say we find an image where the legs and wings are just where you want them for every minute in the day, and then you just do a look up table!

@csdashm Those are the tracked wing tips, actually. I'm excited to look at grooming, but will need to segment out those bits to look at together. There's likely some grooming mixed in here -- it's just 10K randomly chosen frames from ~1000 flies doing whatever flies do (just trying to get a sense of the data). This image shows which points we are tracking. Note colors don't match the figure, just an arbitrary colormap.

More plotting of flies! I call this one "Fruit fly snow angel"

Reminder for those in the US to vote today!
You can look up your polling location and sample ballot here: https://www.vote.org/ .
20 states + DC allow you to register and vote at the same time: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/same-day-registration.aspx
Bonus! You get a sticker. My county has stickers with a cow and grapes and Dulles airport and an artichoke (I think??)!
Don't forget to bring your iD!

@SunFlareSherbet@mstdn.social Kind of? matplotlib is a library in Python used for plotting and data visualization.

@gaymanifold I think both! I started out mainly working in ML, but have been working on understanding fly behavior for over a decade, and am really interested in the algorithms they use for surviving in their world.

@SunFlareSherbet@mstdn.social ur right! It's the plasma colormap in matplotlib to me :).

@gaymanifold prepare to be bored by the minutiae of my work! These are the positions of lots of fruit flies' heads (triangle corners are the eyes and antennae of the fly) if I align them based on their thorax positions. I'm color coding by the angle the head is turned at. We track the eyes and antennae (and a bunch of other parts) of fruit flies using deep learning. I'm interested in understanding what algorithms flies use to explore their worlds, so we are trying to model their behavior, again using deep learning. Anyways, today I was specifically working on how to parameterize head movements, like could it just be a triangle of fixed size that rotates around a single point, so I was trying to visualize the range of head positions. Thanks for asking!

@markkitti oh i just didn't want to spam people's timelines with my silly images :).

What important thing am I working on today? Trying to figure out a good way to parameterize fly head turning from our tracked data. Here's a plot I made while trying to visualize this. It's not really worth explaining what it is, I just thought it had some nice colors 😀

@Birk_Lab@freiburg.social @i_jayas Yes! Took me a while to find it! If you click on Notifications, there's a little settings icon (top right thing here), got to click mute on a bunch of them! (Note that it is NOT under Settings -> Notifications...)

@kedeisha I haven't learned it, so I can't really add a lot :). Going to express an uninformed opinion anyways! My take is it is great if you really care about programming languages, but if you just want to get a job done and make code that is in a language lots of other people are familiar with, can build off of big code bases, it may still be best to work in whatever language is most common in your field. I think I'm in a slightly different field than you, more ML than data science, so, for me, it is currently Python, but I've been programming for like 25 years and it seems to change every 7ish years :).