monday morning

Today I spent most of my time finishing off the reading of "factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm". Oli and I also went through some more examples for the power systems lectures. TODO (for tomorrow): Read the BAE systems report on Smart Grids, Make a gantt chart for time up until the 9 month report, Go through the last question for power systems analysis.

maths

Over the past few days I have been reading two papers that contain quite a bit of maths. I have been going over both papers trying to understand what is going on. It is slow progress for me. The second of the two papers "factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm" is easier to understand and get a grasp of. So far essentially what the algorithm does is to construct a factor graph from a particular problem (which contains functions and variables) and then compute each variable as a product of all the factors. This is essentially computing a functions as a product of local functions (which take less operations to compute). This is what I understand is going on. Other then this, I have been working through a number of power analysis problems consisting of load factors, peak power, cost for generation etc.