Anita Thomas (AMAT 3rd year) will present her research, “Sampling Within the k-Means Algorithm to Cluster Large Datasets,” at the Infinite Possibilities Conference, March 30-31 at the University of Maryland. Thomas reduced the amount of data needed to obtain accurate clusters, thus decreasing runtime to a reasonable speed. The co-authors are Jeremy Bejarano (Brigham Young University), Koushiki Bose (Brown University), and Tyler Brannan (North Carolina State University).

Thomas has been awarded the 2012 Service and Leadership Award for Outstanding Commitment to Service. This award honors a full-time IIT student who displays a uniquely high level of commitment to serving the needs of the IIT Community, non-profit organizations and other philanthropic agencies both local and global. The award is to be presented at the 36th annual Stryker Awards Banquet on April 2.

Thomas will be interning this summer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “I will use quaternions and Mathematica or Metlab to match the meteoroid environment’s coordinate frame to match the frame to that of spacecrafts in order to improve analysis of the meteoroid threat to spacecrafts,” said Thomas.