One of my teacher mentioned that he would like us to somehow measure the area of a triangle. Not any triangle, but a special triangle, the one whose points are from the countries of each members of our assignment groups. So far, I had already three group assignments, the group arrangement for one was decided by the lecturers and the other two were decided by the students ourselves.
The first group assignment I had was back at Reading and the assignment was about to design a Virtual Organisation which offers network security services, for Network Computing module. I have to tell you that in Reading, our NeBCC class was combined with University of Reading’s own master class (not related to Erasmus Mundus scheme) called MSc Network Centred Computing (NCC). This master programme is also an international class like NeBCC. Moreover, I don’t recall that there were English student at all. I know some Pakistanis and Indians, one Chinese (but have already stayed and studied in England for around 4 years), one Sri Lankan, two French guys, one Spanish, and two Germans. The French and the Spanish (it’s Isart, one of my unit-mate) are on Erasmus scheme (different from Erasmus Mundus). Anyways, our group comprised of five people from these countries:
- Pakistan
- Guatemala
- India (1 guy and 1 girl)
- Indonesia (this is me)
There are three persons from South Asia (India and Pakistan share borders), one from Central America and another one from South East Asia. If we measure the area covered by our countries, then it would be a quite vast area.
The second group assignment was formed here in Thessaloniki, the assignment was to do a little bit research on OWL and Protégé in Ontology Development, for Data Bases and Data Mining module. Our group members were from these countries:
- Vietnam
- Taiwan
- Indonesia
Now, the area of a triangle made by our countries would be a relatively-small one since our countries are all in the region of East/South-East Asia.
The next assignment was still for Data Bases and Data Mining module. This time, we will use Weka or RapidMiner to finish ACM KDD Cup 1999: …learn[ing] a predictive model (i.e. a classifier) capable of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate connections in a computer network
. The result may be use to build a Network Intrusion Detection system. You can have a look at the description of the task. Our previous group decided to stay as one group and later “recruited” another member, resulting in this list of countries of the members:
- Vietnam
- Taiwan
- Indonesia
- Bangladesh
With an addition of a Bangladeshi, the area covered by our countries expands significantly, but still, it is not that wide. Now, we are still struggling to finish the assignment as the deadline is on the 22nd of February. So far, no significant problem, and I hope it will stay that way.
Here is the visualisation of the areas of country origin of assignment groups I am/was in: (The first group is the blue area, the second is the red area, beneath the third, which is the green area. Jakarta, Indonesia is pointed with a purple pin.)
Up to now, my conclusion is that, most of us still “flock” towards our own “kind,” which promotes smaller area of the “triangle.”
Indo-EM-ers, have you ever measured the area of this kind of triangles? (or quadruples, or quintuple, or any other polygons for that matter) What do you think of it?