DSCI Students win Best Overall in Police Data Challenge

This fall, teams from the Data Visualization class submitted to the Police Data Challenge competition put on by the American Statistical Association.  One of our teams won Best Overall Presentation, out of more than 70 teams from across the country!  The competition required teams to analyze data on millions of 911 calls and make recommendations to the city. Congrats to Jimmy Hickey, Kapil Khanal, and Luke Peacock; along with fame and fortune, they will also be presenting their findings to the Seattle Police Department! 

More info can be found in the official press release.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:25 PM, Wednesday, November 29, Gildemeister 155

Refreshments served beforehand Gildemeister 135. 

Internship at Fastenal: Information Technology  Support Analyst Ashley Schmit
This semester I started as an IT Support Analyst at Fastenal on their Data Warehouse team. Through this position, I worked alongside Developers and Business Analysts to answer adhoc data requests. I will be talking about my experience, what I learned, and how my education at Winona State guided me.

Scholarship Application Window Now Open

Scholarship applications are now being accepted for the 2018/19 academic year. The Math/Stats Department has about a dozen scholarships available to our majors, so don't miss out! Go to https://winona.academicworks.com/ and search "math" or "statistics" or "data". 

See past departmental scholarship recipients. 

Math Ed Question and Answer Session

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, November 15, Gildemeister 329

Refreshments will be provided from 11:30 to 12:00 in Gild 319. 

Amber Mlynczak 8th grade Math Teacher, Winona Middle School WEA Teacher of the Year	Scott Mlynczak 5th grade Math Teacher, Winona Middle School WSU Alumnus
Two representatives from the Winona Middle School will share their experiences in the teaching profession.  This informal question and answer session will also provide the opportunity for audience members to ask questions about the student teaching experience and the job application process.

MinneMUDAC 2017 was a success!

This last weekend, 6 teams from Winona State competed in MinneMUDAC 2017. MinneMUDAC is an annual competition that pits students against a formidable data set and analytics problem.  Teams are given one month to work with the data before the day of the competition and then travel to the Twin Cities to present their findings to teams of judges.  All but one of our teams competed in the undergraduate division (against 19 other teams) and one team competed in the novice division (against 22 other novice teams).

WSU students participating in MinneMUDAC 2017

The WSU students from all teams showed an impressive dedication to tackling this challenge, attending 2 meetings a week and spending a considerable amount of time preparing for the day of presentations.  This dedication paid off!  We had three teams in the top 5 in the undergraduate competition.  Furthermore, four teams were singled out for various awards, listed below.

First Place Overall - Undergraduate Division

Sam Meyers, Sam Dokkebakken, Eddie Schmit, Austin Ellingworth, and Jack Barta

Acumen Award - Undergraduate Division

Reagan Buske, Chris Humbert, Mariah Quam, David Stampley Jr., and McHale Dye

Honorable Mention - Undergraduate Division

Kapil Khanal, William Diedrick, Akif Khan, Jimmy Hickey, and Sean Wittenberg

Best Prediction - Undergraduate Division

The MIS team had the best prediction out of all teams not in the top 5.

Also, while not in the top 5 teams, the other two teams performed well and multiple positive comments were heard on the presentations of both teams.

Thanks to Todd Iverson, Silas Bergen, Brant Deppa, and Chris Malone for helping prepare our students for the competition through biweekly meetings.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, November 8, Gildemeister 155

Refreshments served beforehand Gildemeister 135. 

 

Internship at Fastenal: Supply Chain Analyst Will Wermager
Starting in June of 2017, I took a position with Fastenal as a Supply Chain Analyst. This job experience has provided me with a lot of insight into the professional environment and the importance of accurate data and reporting. There is a significant amount of work that must first go into preparing data before it is ready for analysis. Come learn about my experience!
Summer Internship in GP Industry Investment Fund   Fengrui Xue
	I’ll talk about what an employee in a “PE” (Private Equity) fund does and my meetings with corporations such as JKOM Cloud Health Technology Company to discuss their needs for C-round financing.

Winona State wins PME "Face Off!"

Bradley Erickson, Gabriel Mancino-Ball, Nick Meyer, and Michael Holmblad

A group of WSU math majors traveled the Wisconsin Pi Mu Epsilon Math Conference at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin over the weekend of November 3 and 4 and returned champions.  A group of 4 math majors won the Face Off competition.  Face Off is a mathematics Jeopardy-style quiz show which forces contestants to think and compute quickly.  The contestants are challenged with mathematical problems, puzzles, math puns, and more.   Our WSU team consisting of Bradley Erickson, Michael Holmblad , Gabriel Mancino-Ball, and Nick Meyer took home the first place finish over 9 other teams from around the Midwest.  Also traveling to the conference from WSU were Carson Boots, Emily Duden, Conager Mrozek, and Anna Ramsey.  Michael Holmblad and Gabriel Mancino-Ball both gave presentations on their mathematical research.  Michael presented a talk titled Trying to Create a New Random Number Generator and Gabriel presented a talk titled The Asymptotic Z-Transform.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, November 1, Gildemeister 155

Refreshments served beforehand Gildemeister 135. 

 

Trucking through the Data McHale Dye
This past summer I had an internship at Dart Transit Company, a national trucking business here in Minnesota.  At Dart I participated in the BI and Data analytics team where we were given various projects of analyzation to help better the company as a whole.  I will be talking about one of these projects, which mainly focused on the prediction of profitability of a given hour in a driver’s day.
Valuing Forecast Accuracy  Chris Humbert
	This summer I was an Analytics Intern at John Deere. My main project focused on the importance of forecast accuracy, more specifically what is impacted when a forecast is x% more or less accurate. Application of my project was creating an RShiny app to quantify a dollar cost by how accurately we forecasted.

Department Seminar

12:45 - 1:45 PM, Thursday, October 19, Gildemeister 329

Light lunch served from 12:15-12:45PM in Department Conference Room (Gild 320)  

Being Awesome in Today’s Workplace   Brian Hackerson 3M WSU Alumnus
The rate of change in business today is not slowing down, and as a result the skills necessary to thrive are evolving around us. Being a math major today brings opportunities not in existence even ten years ago, and will probably fuel professions not even known today. The talk will not only cover today’s opportunities for math majors, but will reveal some insights from within a large global corporation on what it takes for awesomeness at work.
	Brian is a senior technology leader focused on delivering software and data solutions, working for many large companies over his 29 year career. Upon joining the SEMS (Software Electronic and Mechanical Systems) Lab at 3M in 2006, Brian became interested in Agile methodologies while driving multiple division software and systems programs, both from commercialization and corporate research perspectives. In 2017, Brian was named to lead the Scrum activities in the SEMS Corporate Research Lab to drive speed and quality of execution promoting new business growth. Brian graduated from Winona State University in 1988 with a BS in Mathematics.

Department Colloquium

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, October 4, Gildemeister 155

Refreshments served beforehand Gildemeister 135. 

Dynamic Neural Field Modeling   Dr. Joe Ambrose University of Iowa/Fastenal WSU Alumnus

Dynamic field theory provides an explanation for how the brain gives rise to behavior via the coordinated activity of populations of neurons. Dynamic Neural Field models use differential equations to abstract and describe the activity patterns and interactions of such neural populations. In this way, one can simulate and visualize processes such as attention, memory, and change detection, across one or more dimensions such as spatial position or color. These models have been used in a variety of disciplines - from Psychology and Physiology to Robotics. In this talk, I will introduce the motivation, fundamental concepts, and positive results of Dynamic Neural Field modeling as experienced during my PhD research.

Student Study Abroad Seminar

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, September 20, Gildemeister 155

Refreshments served beforehand Gildemeister 135. 

My Semester Abroad in Ghana   Stacey Miertschin

Last semester Stacey studied abroad in Ghana, West Africa, at the University of Cape Coast. Through amazing days and rough days, she learned a great deal both in and out of the classroom about herself, others, and the world around us. She will share her experiences and encourage others to study abroad.

Student Seminar

12:00 - 12:50 PM, Wednesday, September 6, Gildemeister 155

Refreshments served beforehand Gildemeister 135. 

 

Understanding Elliptic Curves in the Cryptographic World Michael Holmblad
Cryptography is a topic that can get really complex very fast. Every cryptographic system is based on some type of problem. Elliptic curve cryptography is based on the discrete log problem using elliptic curves. Elliptic curves have their own group and field properties. The algorithms that come from elliptic curve cryptography are simple to follow, but hard to crack. Elliptic curve cryptography also has several successes and challenges in the corporate world.
On the Algebra of Rotations in ℝ3: An Exploration of Representations by Quaternions and SU(2)  Nick Meyer
	The need to represent rotations of objects in 3-D Euclidean space arises daily in many fields: animation, computer vision, and physics, to name a few. Ever since Euler first described his eponymous angles, without giving a tractable method for constructing them, mathematicians have longed for a better system to describe rotations. In 1843, William Rowan Hamilton had an epiphany whilst walking across Brougham Bridge in Dublin with his wife. Therein he inscribed the laws defining the quaternions, forever changing the face of rotations. The quaternions, when limited to having unit norm, form a group under multiplication which is isomorphic to SU(2). This presentation will discuss the interplay between these two groups and will clarify the use of quaternions to represent rotations. We will delve into the relationship between SU(2) and SO(3).