Welcome!

This blog will be used to discuss progress about the independent study research that Dr. Stonedahl and I are working on.

The plan is to model whirligig beetles' movement.  This builds on earlier work discussed in this blog.

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Week 11 Report

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Over the term, Dr. Stonedahl and I have worked on the videos of the chicks to find a way to accurately track their movements and create a model of them. So far, we have accomplished the following goals: ·        We effectively remove the background of the video by using Gaussian blur and threshold to convert the video into black-and-white. We further use erosion to reduce the area of the chicks so that it decreases the occasions when the chicks move next to one another and they merge in the process. We also use the contour tool to mark the center of the chicks (the blue dot) because it makes it easier to store the coordinates of the current position of each chick further on. Background Removal  ·        Learning from the Whirligig Beetle Project, we also successfully create a multiple frame tracking function. We create a Chick class where it stores the current location of one chick. Then we use 3 lists of the Chick object to keep track of all the chicks: one to store the chic
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Week 2 + 3 Report

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These past 2 weeks, I have done lots of readings on the book An Introduction to Agent-based Modelling by Uri Wilensky and William Rand. I read from Chapter 1 to Chapter 7, learning about what agent-based modelling means, how to create a simple agent-based model and how to analyze the model that we have. I further studied some models in the library of NetLogo, including the Flocking Model. This model illustrates the flocking of birds based on 3 primary rules: alignment, cohesion, and separation. Learning about how this model works and figuring out the code behind it helps me have a better understanding of the Whirligig Models (the stream, the turn-back, getting food...) I also did some readings on articles about the whirligig beetles' behaviors, namely Social Behavior of Adult Whirligig Beetle by V. J. Fitzgerald and Aggregation and Predator Avoidance in Whirligig Beetles by K. Vulinec, M. C. Miller. I learned that whirligig beetles are very sensitive to the temperature of the e
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