Looking Back 2015

Every year is a total of 365 unique days, so each year is different with new memories and experiences. Even though there's always combination of good and bad days, some years are very special, and you don't want to look back at some. But most often we are so busy to live our everyday life that we don't have time to look back and calculate what we've gained and what we've lost; think about whether we could really live the year as we wanted to or not. 

Looking back at 2015 now, probably it has been the busiest year of my life, which also helped me grow a lot - I traveled the most, attended my first conference and also presented there, took some challenging courses and learned many new things, embraced my vulnerability and fear of failure, and most of all, met some amazing people who added the best memories of the year. All of these have definitely helped me grow a lot. At the same time 2015 was probably one of the most stressful years of my life, but for this moment I decided to let everything go and only take the good memories with me to the new year.

One of my fav photos from St Anne's College, Oxford

Best Memories of 2015

With all the challenging coursework of Spring 2015, the first half went by super fast and super busy, without too many new happenings. Summer was the most fun, and full of beautiful memories. Fall 2015 was really busy and stressful as well but with many new happenings. So, here are the best memories -

• Celebrating first birthday in US! Well, I'm not the birthday celebration type of person, I used to be but not anymore. In fact, last couple of years I almost tried to escape from the day, but couldn't do that this year. Received a surprise birthday party from close friends, which was very sweet of them, and got some lovely and thoughtful presents as well. Overall, birthday was well-spent, and growing up with these wonderful people didn't feel so bad after all!
• Captured my first thunderbolt shot! I always wanted to capture such a photo and finally my dream came true! After trying 20 shots while sitting in a running car, I finally got a good one. And it also became my first photo to be Explored on Flickr.

Yes! :D

• Attending Oxford-Illinois Digital Libraries Placement Program! Sorry, I had to bold this cause this is the BEST thing that happened in this year cause it was a whole new experience, and really helped me to look at life in a different way. First of all, that was my first time in Europe and all by myself. I had the opportunity to work with Oxford e-Research Centre with some of the most wonderful people there. Attended Oxford Digital Humanities Summer School for a week and also presented my poster there, which was definitely the most fun week during my whole stay. Most importantly, I could successfully finish my project in 5 weeks and received a lot of appreciation from everyone at the OeRC, which also got accepted at the iConference 2016. I can't thank enough for all the love, care and appreciation I received in 1.5 months. I'd probably treasure these people and the moments my whole life.

Really enjoyed running at the Oxford University Park after work everyday

My present from the colleagues at OeRC

• Traveled to 9 different cities in 3 countries this year - Chicago, Wisconsin-Madison, Bloomington, Carbondale in US, Oxford, London, Manchester, Bath in UK, and Vancouver in Canada. Also, didn't have any phone and mostly no Internet connection while traveling in UK, which I consider as an achievement! And of course, that included a lot of getting lost but let's not count that :p

Stunning Vancouver from the hotel window

• Presented for the first time at a conference (DLF Forum 2015), which was quite scary as I never spoke on stage in front of hundreds of professional people. But I made it! Yay! Achievement unlocked! :D
• I also painted more than last year and wrote the highest number of blog posts in last three years. So, overall not a bad year in terms of productivity! 

Despite of all the stress and tough times, 2015 wasn't that bad year after all! And for me the take away is to fully live each moment cause we can't promise tomorrow. Who knows what happens to me next year, I don't know where I'll be, whether I'll live another year or not, but at this moment I'm grateful to live this year and for all the beautiful memories that I'd love to relive in the new year :)

Things I love about UIUC!

This weekend I decided to write about my life at UIUC because I figured I never really wrote about how awesome it is to be an Illini! I guess we just get so used to living here everyday that we often forget how precious it is to be a part of this campus. So, this post is all about my life at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - because it's special! :)

Alma Mater always greets you with love and blessings

It has been almost 1.5 years since I joined UIUC, but it feels like just the other day that I got here! I remember I fell in love with this campus and the people here from the very first day. The people here in this twin city are so kind, welcoming and helpful that I never felt out of place. 

Places I love on campus - I never get enough of the gorgeous architectural structures here. Starting it's journey as Illinois Industrial University in 1867, and named as University of Illinois in 1885, the university will soon turn 150 years old [1]. I love how all the beautiful historic structures tell the stories of the past, especially the Altgeld Hall (commonly known as Math Building) and the Foellinger Auditorium. Both of them are more than 100 years old, and Altgeld Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Buildings in 1970 [2].

Backside of the Foellinger Auditorium in spring

Another very special part of the university is the library. UIUC holds the pride of having the largest public college library in the nation holding 13,158,748 volumes, and ranked as the second largest college library after Harvard [3]. The Main Library was actually the first place I visited on campus on my very first day since I'm working as a Graduate Assistant (GA) here, and it totally blew my mind away. It has a great environment and I especially love the main reading room on the second floor. During my first week of GA orientation, even before our classes started, I luckily met the coolest people there - Katrina, Alonso, Nate, Madison to name a few. And I'm glad that I can call these awesome people my close friends, who made me feel special here from the very beginning :)

I also like the lake side on the engineering quad, especially during spring and early summer. Busking in the sun while reading book, playing with the dandelions by the lake or just have a slow walk around the quad after work are probably my favorite things to do there.

Engineering Quad

The next thing I must mention is my department - Graduate School of Library and Information Science (soon becoming the iSchool at Illinois). I should write a whole post on that because it's a super awesome place to be! It's great program with lots of resources ranking no. 1 in the nation, and all the people - students, professors, staff - everyone makes it special. I feel like I had a lot of opportunities to grow in last 1 year, and definitely met some of the greatest people here, who I know I'll keep in touch even when we graduate. It wasn't an easy decision for me to leave my comfort zone in Japan but I believe I made the best decision by coming here, which I'll never regret.

Fun things to do - Fun time is really something precious when at grad school :-/ Being full time student and working half time doesn't really leave me or most of my friends with much free time but we do fun stuff here. Krannert Art Museum and Spurlock Museum on campus provide us with the opportunity to enjoy art exhibitions. There are always many cultural shows and performances at the Krannert Centre of the Performing Arts. We have two nice movie theatre in downtown Champaign - the Art Theatre and the Virginia Theatre. I absolutely love the vintage look of the Virginia Theatre! And there are often concerts at the bars like Pizza M or Iron Post. 

Having brunch at Radio Maria, or dinner at my favorite restaurant Seven Saints with friends, going to movies and concerts or just having fun time at home with some good food, good music, and good people - these are enough to keep my spirit up :)

The gorgeous Virginia Theatre 

Concert night at Pizza M 

We also get a lot of stunning sunrise and sunsets here, probably one of my favorite things here. So, my camera is full of sky photos. Also, we have pretty cherry blossom in spring, gorgeous fall and beautiful snow during winter. May be I'll write about them and post those seasonal photos on some other post. I'll wrap up with two photos I took at the arboretum this morning. The sun was peeping through the trees and lighting up the lightly snow covered grasses, and they were dazzling brightly like small pieces of diamond. That scene just made my day, and these are the precious things that make my everyday life special here :)

UIUC Arboretum 

Sparkly grasses

Reference

1. "A Brief History of the University of Illinois." A Brief History of the University of Illinois. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2015. <http://archives.library.illinois.edu/features/history.php>.

2. "Mathematics." History of Altgeld Hall, Department of , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2015. <http://www.math.illinois.edu/History/altgeld_history.html>.

3. "The Nation's Largest Libraries: A Listing By Volumes Held." ALA Library Fact Sheets. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.ala.org/tools/libfactsheets/alalibraryfactsheet22>.

Painting is the Secret Cure

Remember those days of childhood when you'll fall sick, and feel the urge to finish all the homework in bed, right at that moment? I guess pretty much everyone felt the same way, cause what else will you do lying in bed? At least I did! Well, "luckily" when you're in grad school, you don't have much choice but actually DO all the homework. And if it's finals time, and there's nobody around to take care of you then you got it all! 

That's where I've been this whole week, sick with cold, fever, headache, body ache and every possible thing, and dumped under huge load of work. And that's the worst part of being adult, staying alone at home, and not having family around. That's the time I mostly feel sad about studying abroad, because you can't even tell your mom that you're sick unless she'll be too worried :( 

Anyway, while my body couldn't get itself out of bed, my usual hyperactive brain didn't quite like that. So, when I was stuck at home with sickness for past couple of days, I actually got some work done (well, there was no other choice :-/). But restless brain still wasn't happy and won't go to sleep, and kept wandering in the memory lane for every possible (terrible) thing that happened in the past, and overthink about future stuff that hasn't happened yet! And the only way I can treat my hyperactivity and stress is through painting. So, I decided to tame that brain with some fun time with brush and colors :) Other than the fact that, I'm actually supposed to work on my research project right now, I'm pretty happy about this painting!

Final product

Little close up

That's actually what I want to do and where I want to be right now. Go to some quiet, naturally beautiful place, probably top of a mountain; take a deep breath and believe everything will be alright. So, I named it "Serenity" :)

Fun with Data - Basics of R - Part 1

It's been a while since I wrote my last technical post, actually I need to finish writing my database series. When I started grad school, my plan was to write post on every new exciting thing I learn for my own reference. But due to time constraint couldn't make it. Recently I'm learning to use statistical software R for data analytics, which is a widely used tool, and I thought it'd be useful to write about the basics for anyone who'd like to learn it from scratch. I'll keep these posts short and write as I learn more.

Using R on your machine

I'm using R with the software R Studio, which requires to have R installed on your computer. Both are supported for all platforms such as Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu. Since I'm using MacOS, I'll write about how it works for this platform. But it'll be pretty similar for other ones. 

First of all, make sure you have R installed. In your terminal type which r, which will return the path of where R is installed, or simply type r, which will start r console. If you don't have it installed then you can easily install it from the following link - https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/

Then download and install R Studio from the following link- https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

If the installation is completed properly then you can run the software, which will look like the screen below, but without any data of course. I've marked the fields as A, B, C, and D to explain their meaning and usage.

The top left field A is to write the scripts like any other text editor. You can write your script and select any portion to run. Or you can use the bottom left field B, which is R console to directly input the scripts and see output. It works similar to terminal or iTerm.

The top right field C is where the data frames are shown once any data frame or table is imported or created. As for me, I've three tables in my working directory now. And in the bottom right field D all the graphical outputs are shown, such as bar plot, scatterplot, etc. 

Loading data into R

The commonly used data formats are .csv or .txt, and usually gathered from other data sources and then loaded into R. Once you have your file saved on your machine, get the full path of the file, which can be done by viewing the information or properties of the file. For example, my ihis_0005.csv file is saved under /Documents/fall2015_classes/SODA_EVD directory. The command to read csv file is simply read.csv() and the file path goes within the parentheses. You would like to give the table a name, which is ihis_data in my case. So the command will be,

your_table_name <- read.csv("your_file_path")

Once you have your data loaded, it'll show up on the top right section. R is very helpful to show the summary of the data by just typing the command summary(your_table_name), which is useful for quantitative variables. It returns minimum and maximum value, mean, median, 1st quartile, 3rd quartile values for each column. For categorical variables using the table() command is more useful. To see the actual distribution of values for any certain column with categorical variable, type table(your_table_name$column_name). The $ sign denotes columns for that table.

You can also see all the data frames in your working directory by ls() command, where ls means list. And delete any data frame by rm(your_table_name), where rm means remove. To delete multiple tables at ones list all the table names you would like to delete like this-
rm(list = c("table1", "table2", ...)

These are the preparatory steps before we can actually go ahead and play with our data. I'll write more about how to actually have fun with it in my following post (which I believe will happen soon!) :)