Project 2: Extracting structure from time-ordered log files

Data for this project come from the Dartmouth College wireless network project www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~campus/. Students will be asked to take the original time-ordered log file and create flow-centered (movement defined in terms of network accesses) map of the campus.

The practical goal of this project is to use Unix and Perl tools to extract usable information from the Dartmouth log file. Keep in mind that these data were collected by careful researchers who were attempting to uncover some of the same effects that we're examining; any difficulties you have in processing can only get worse in less carefully collected data. So another goal of this project is to have you experience a kind of programming in which you continually refine your programs/algorithms as you learn more about the data.

What you are really learning is a process of checking your computations and assessing if you've got it "right." With this kind of programming, you are not as interested in a piece of code that solves a general class of problems. Instead, you are creating a program that lets you do just one thing; clean/shape/extract information from the data you've been given.

Students are encouraged to check with their groups to compare methods and verify their "answers."

The assignment: Project 1 | Task 3