A collection of personal and academic projects by Michael Chatzidakis ranging from supervised machine learning, to cancer research, to DIY algae photobioreactors to swordmaking.
I work on a variety of material such as: Opal, Topaz, Cubic Zirconia, Ruby, Rutile, LYSO, LuAG, Emerald View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize
Branching The tree-like branching that happens over small and large distance scales alike I have found fascinating for so long. The branching that occurs in life can be found everywhere - from the veins in your arm, to the alveoli in your lungs, the branches of a tree, or its roots. It occurs in the branching of rivers down a mountain, or the erosion of the mountain into canyons. The way that…
You may have heard of a variety of terms such as: features, bottlenecks, embeddings, feature vectors, feature representations, feature spaces, latent vectors and latent spaces. I'm sure you are also well aware of the incredible amount of jargon dominating the field of machine learning. The aim of this post is to disseminate this jargon and understand what exactly a feature is and why feature…
Ever since I was little I have been fascinated by space. I loved the planets and asteroids and moons and comets and all of the shiny things you can see with telescopes. I have always wanted a piece of space. So after 24 years, here I am. I found a meteorite seller through Reddit - the guys website is the Meteorite Market . He has a fantastic collection. I bought a small (< 1 g) piece of the…
I participated in my first Kaggle challenge a few months ago. For a PhD level course I took in Computing and Software (CAS 771), Introduction to Big Data Systems we had to choose a term project that showcased Big Data. Vague, I know. I decided to take the opportunity to learn about multilayer neural networks (commonly known as a multilayer perceptron, or MLP) and convolutional neural networks…
Background Hyperspectroscopy is the field of fusing spatial and spectral information together to create powerful chemical maps. Maps taken from satellites are more often than not hyperspectral. Not only can they produce an image of the X-Y plane below them (the intricacies of thickness and a Z-direction is a topic for another day), but they can capture information in the infrared usually or some…
Every other year, a well known large Materials Science & Engineering conference (TMS) takes place and students compete to construct the best sword. In our department of Materials Science & Engineering at McMaster university, our steel research is one of the best in the world because of Hamilton's historical ties to the steel industry. We had tons of furnaces, but not many expendable ones where a…
I took an amazing PhD level course last year, CSE 780 - Data Science taught by Prof. Paul McNicholas. It was my introduction to Data Science and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Dr. McNicholas is a fantastic and brilliant professor. We were allowed to pick a dataset and showcase our data science knowledge around it. I chose the Kaggle contest Human Activity Recognition with Smartphones. Below is my…
Designing course curricula for 2nd year undergraduates to teach them the importance of prototyping and iteration.
An Analogy Highlighting Scale Lets say we can think of an array of nanowires as a lawn full of green grass in suburbia. The goal is to make the perfect bushy lawn to brag to all of your suburban neighbors. So we want to make a lawn that has evenly spaced grass all of uniform height and thickness. That'll show those neighbors! Okay so lets add constraints. Lets say we can only take pictures of our…
I saw these little underwater moss bonsai tree aquariums when I was in the depths of YouTube last year. I was transitioning between my backpacking trip May 2016, and starting my Masters in July 2016 and I did a few projects to pass the time. The hydroponic system, algae photobioreactor and this aquarium were all started in that time-frame. This aquarium project is the only project that survived. I…
My journey to creating a DIY photobioreactor. Some successes and some challenges.
I was inspired for this project by Britta Riley's TED talk titled Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment. In this talk she discusses the struggles of trying to grow a garden with limited space in urban cities. The premise of the efficiency is as follows. One flower pot is connected to the one below it such that the excess run off from one pot waters the one below. The water is pumped up to the…
I'm going to attempt to outline a fairly complex and counter intuitive problem and misconception many people have. First let me ask you a question. If I plant a tree, am I reversing global warming? Think about it. You might say, well yes, trees suck up carbon dioxide and turn it into more tree. Yes that is true. But what happens when the tree dies? It decomposes and returns that stored carbon into…
You heard that right! This was for my final Engineering & Society capstone senior project. I was enrolled in the Engineering & Society program which is a program that in addition to your major (Materials Science & Engineering in my case) you take additional core courses in environmental, ethics, sustainability and communication. The intent of the Engineering & Society program was to create…
Apologies for the somewhat gruesome thumbnail image of the mice above. In the summer of 2015, I won an international scholarship, (RISE-DAAD), to work at the Institute of Radiopharmaceutical Cancer Research in Dresden, Germany. As part of a DAAD-RISE Scholarship, I worked under Dr. Holger Stephan at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Dresden, Germany. Together with his then PhD student…
This was one of my all time favourite projects. In my open ended lab course, MATLS 2H04 back when I was a second year undergraduate student we had the entire semester to "Measure the resistivity of a material and how it changes with temperature" Naturally I overcomplicated the crap out of the problem statement and took it upon myself and our group to make a really complicated material. With total…
For my second year project course (the same one I later TA'd) I created a rechargable battery from scratch. Our professor of the class stood up at the front of the class, wrote the following line on the board, said we had 4 months to do so and walked out: Make a battery. Half the class laughed, they said they were going to make a lemon battery. We had 4 months to do so, what a joke! I did not feel…