Bio

Andrés Arámburo is a senior physics student at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California. Last summer he worked with the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma ray observatory team at the University of Maryland. Currently, he is working at the UNAM Astronomy Institute on his bachelor thesis about the effect of weak tidal forces on the orbital structure of a galaxy. He is particularly interested in physics and computer science. He also enjoys any medium of good storytelling, philosophy and music.

Project: Wikipedia Articles

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, constitutes the largest general reference website [1], holding over 5 million articles in English and totaling more than 38 million articles in 292 languages [2]. These features make Wikipedia one of the top 10 most visited sites on the worldwide web [3].

Even though Wikipedia has a huge number of articles, the way they are categorized (which is completely user based) makes it hard to visualize all of its content [4, 5]. Therefore, it is interesting to seek an automatic and efficient way of clustering the articles by their common topics. This is the scope and motivation of my project: to make a graph that will show different articles and how they are connected to each other.

The way I am approaching this is to set a metric. This will try to measure how close the articles are to each other by their “relatedness.” One of the great advantages of doing this is the flexibility of setting the metric, because I can set different ways to measure their “closeness” (e.g. via shared hyperlinks, keywords, number of words, geographical location, etc.). This would help get different maps, and by looking at their discrepancies I can obtain a more in-depth notion about the connections between articles.

References

[1] Wikipedia, “Wikipedia.” (Sep 13, 2016) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia.

[2] M. Safer, correspondent, “Wikimania.” CBSnews.com. (Apr 5, 2016) www.cbsnews.com/news/wikipedia-jimmy-wales-morley-safer-60-minutes.

[3] Alexa Internet, Inc., “The Top 500 Sites on the Web,” Alexa. (Sep 13, 2016) www.alexa.com/topsites.

[4] A. Halavais and D. Lackaff, “An Analysis of Topical Coverage of Wikipedia,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication [online], 13(2) 2008 pp. 429–440.

[5] T. Holloway, M. Božičević and K. Börner, “Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia and Its Authors,” ArXiv Computer Science e-Prints. (Sep 13, 2016)

Favorite 3-Color 2D Totalistic Cellular Automaton

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