Today I won’t be discussing results in details, but let’s just say I have started shifting focus a bit away from running environments and technical implementation of the simulator, towards visualizing results AND how the simulator actually works.

I shared with my tutor some of the new visualizations I am working on, yesterday, and the feedback was positive.

Further visualizations

Well today I thought I’d actually create a Shiny App to “show” what the simulator is all about in a more interactive manner.

Why? To show off my (awful) Shiny skills? Not quite.

But the whole concept is a bit hard to explain to others, and there is a lot of simulations of infections progress on networks, and genetic algorithms, both of which have rather intricate relations with the concept of passing of time.

And showing something with the passing of time is… What animations are all about.

Interactive and Dynamic

Granted, creating a Shiny App to explain my project instead of working on the dissertation (which should be precisely about explaining it), seems a bit of an overkill.

However, for the defense of the final paper/dissertation, I am expected to produce a 20’ video.

Would you rather watch a video of me going through 80 pages of a PDF with some images? Or having me show in an interactive application the concepts of SIS on graphs, proposed options of controls of infection, and demonstrations of GA progress with the passing of generations and the improvements about decisions a computer can make on its own to control said infections?

All with colors, animations, varying parameters, etc?

I like my idea better, although I’ll eventually have to write the Dissertation itself and I am sweating to put together the Shiny App (I won’t lie, it’s been a while…).

Also, I was told I might get a chance to present my work at a small R conference, and I feel I owe my potential audience something that’s understandable and that won’t get them all snoring within 2 minutes 😅

Conclusions

The results? Some other time!

For now, I’ll take a couple of weeks or so during which I’ll try to slow down a bit overall, recharge for 2024.

Happy holidays everyone!