The Just Saying blog

My fabulous sister Cyndie Cottrell has started a cleverly written blog on everything and anything.
Visit her blog Just Saying. Her topics range from family and love to using mathematical rigor on humanitarian aid concepts. I think you will enjoy it.

"Lots of things can be said about a lot of things, so here I'm just saying a few of those things."

-   February 25th, 2011

Disease Outbreak Detection Research

Now that we have access to much larger volumes of real-time hospital data than ever before, it is crucial for us to use this information to improve public health surveillance. I have been analyzing various methods with which current disease outbreak detection algorithms might be greatly improved such as the use of standard machine learning techniques in conjunction with the algorithms currently in place. I believe this area has great potential and I intend to explore it in as much depth as I can. I have documented the preliminary work that I have done so far here.

-   September 13th, 2010

Resume Uploaded

I have now uploaded a copy of my most recent resume. You can find it in the services page. I have tried to make it as untargeted as possible so keep in mind there is more to my curriculum vitae than that.

-   August 31st, 2010

The Noin Maze

The Noin Maze has now been released! This game was developed by David and Jonathan Cottrell (brothers). We have invested quite a bit of time and effort in this and hope that you will grow to love and enjoy our adorable, fuzzy, blue little Noin. Click here to get the game. Enjoy!

-   August 13th, 2010

WML Parser

Check out my JavaScript Wiki Markup Language Parser. Although it is not a particularly useful tool it has other merits. See what you can do with it (it is substantially more powerful than meets the eye, trust me!)

-   August 9th, 2010

Coming Soon: The Noin Maze

David and I are in the final stages of development for our first video game ever. All that is left to do is finish up some of the graphics and polish off the last few levels. For more information about The Noin Maze, click here.

-   August 6th, 2010

Current Research:

Under the direction of McGill Computer Science Undergraduate Program Director Dr. Doina Precup I am doing research on disease outbreaks in conjuction with the McGill Clinical and Health Informatics (MCHI) group which is an excellent research group led by Dr. David Buckeridge. This approach to disease outbreak detection uniquely combines expertise from Computer Science and Epidemiology in a very meaningul way. There are three main aspects of this area of research that I am currently focusing on:

(1) The various techniques and algorithms that are currently in use to detect disease outbreaks and how they can be substantially improved in order to increase their reliability and general usefulness.

(2) The use of Statistical and Computer Science tools to measure the performance of these algorithms in pragmatic ways

(3) The use of well-studied Machine Learning techniques to optimize decision making in the face of various epidemics and similar health threats.

The research is funded through a Science Undergraduate Research Award (SURA). At the end of August, I will publish the results of my research online for all to see.

-   July 29th, 2010