User:BrianLin
About Me!
Hi, my name is Brian Lin. I'm from Lake Zurich, Illinois (about an hour north of Chicago). I have a nice farm in my backyard (it's not mine though), a marsh, and a forest. We get a lot of deer, foxes, coyotes, and skunks (unfortunately). I went to a large public school with a bit less than 4,000 people.
Currently a 1st year BME student here at Duke. Some interests include:
- Barefoot running around Duke and Durham late at night (generally in the 1-3 am range)
- Eating 14 oz. bags of Swedish fish in the span of two days
- Playing guitar (mainly Anime music covers at the moment but I'm a big fan of Dispatch, Streetlight Manifesto, Dream Theater, etc.)
- Learning Chinese (and then hopefully Korean, Cantonese, and Japanese)
- Cooking/making/baking cool food (like Mochi Ice Cream and Bubble Tea) but not cleaning up
- Coming up with new frisbee forehand styles
- Making bad League of Legends puns/jokes
- Doing pull-ups
- Squeezing as many 'thank you's, 'please's, and 'bless you's as possible into each day
Grand Challenges
[1] Sherali Zeadally, Gregorio Martinez, Han-Chieh Chao, IEEE Computer Society, April 2013, accessed August 31 2014
MATLAB
Four Linked Tori [2]
I haven't had too much experience in the computer programming world, but with my few forays (including the LaTeX lab), I've really grown to appreciate organization, simplicity, and efficiency. When using R in the past and running T tests and other Stats tests across large matrices of data (such as histone methylation across the blood samples of 80 people), I'd often end up with up to a couple minutes of downtime waiting for the program to run. With that in mind, it's really interesting to see how MATLAB can create a complicated-looking graphic from such a simple program. Of course, this is very different from churning through large amounts of data, but it's impressive nonetheless.