Week 6: 2/22-2/26

What did I do this week?

I listened to another speaker who was UTCS alumni working in Austin. Because I have already had some experience in industry, the material he covered wasn’t that new to me. However, he did mention some interesting content about open-source that I had never thought about before. Though the topic he was talking about was familiar to me, I’m glad that he gave this talk with his own personal thoughts. Othe than that, this week wasn’t too eventful. This is the week before the first midterm, so we have focused on reviewing the main parts of C++.

What’s in my way?

The upcoming midterm is what is in my way. There is so much to study for, but because Downing has been constantly reviewing material taught earlier in the class, all of the main topics are still fresh on my mind. So, I predict studying for this midterm will be a lot of practice to ensure my syntax is correct rather than learning the material.

What will I do next week?

I will continue studying for the midterm on Friday. In addition, I have another midterm to study for, so I have to balance my studying for both of these classes.

Recent Discovery

I read some material regarding how a basic typo word suggestion algorithm works. There are many ways to generate candidate words, but you have to be smart about it. For instance, you could use the edit distance DP algorithm to help with the heuristic for finding the differnces between two words. Using this, you could build a probabilistic function that tells you how likely that certain word is to show up with that specific typo. There is so much to do with such a seemingly easy task of suggesting fixes to typos.