Just wanted to announce that we have published a new scientific article: Curate et al. 2016: “A method for sex estimation using the proximal femur” on Forensic Science International. Again this is a collaborative work with some members from the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology.

Some highlights from the article:

• Models to estimate sex in incomplete and fragmentary human skeletal remains.
• Simple and straightforward measurements in the proximal portion of the femur.
• Femoral neck axis length and femoral neck width show sexual dimorphism.
• A decision tree with both variables gives the most accurate and less biased results.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.06.011

I’ve also built a simple app that allows easy implementation of the method, SeuPF. Try it!

The method for sex estimation only needs two simple femoral measurements to work.

Besides, on a brief note, I’d also like to bring attention to CIAS - Centro de Investigação em Antropologia e Saúde (Research Centre of Anthropology and Health) and its new face, cleaner design and web address. This was a very challenging project that I loved to be part of. Please visit it:

Hey there,

I’m proud to announce that my first peer-reviewed paper “One for all and all for one: Linear regression from the mass of individual bones to assess human skeletal mass completeness” is out on the renewed American Journal of Forensic Anthropology.

Not a bad magazine for the first one, huh?

This was a collaborative work lead by David Gonçalves that counted with the help of many team members from the Laboratory of Forensic Anthropology. I was deeply involved in this project from the beginning, and my main contributions were with the statistical analysis and predictive modelling. Plus, designing and programming a simple webapp, that was branded as MassReg. It allows users to explore our data and apply our models to their own samples.

Neat no?

We also gave recently a conferece talk titled “MassReg: An application to predict the skeleton mass of adult individuals in incomplete or poorly preserved assemblages of human remains where we explored and explained the potential of the app for an audience of researchers that gathered in Badajoz, Spain.

By the way, 2 days from now on, there will be 2 posters presentations in the 85th AAPA that I’d like to bring your attention to:

• Scott et al. 2016. rASUDAS: A New Method for Estimating Ancestry from Tooth Crown and Root Morphology
• Marcia et al. 2016. Sex diagnosis of the human dentition after heat exposure: the potential of cementum-enamel junction and root dimensions

That’s all!

Keep on belelelele.

Yo folks.

It’s time for some more show off! Here is my latest project:

LFA.UC.PT

For this project I had to develop a lot of stuff. First, there was no identity image associated to the lab. So I had to start by proposing the following logotype that was readily accepted by the majority of the lab team:

Next, I had to develop a few more neat visuals as you can see in the Projects section. Last, I started working in this beauty:

There’s a lot of info about our lab there, including news, events, members CVs, how to collaborate with us, among others. Give lfa.uc.pt a visit!

Untz!

Yo!

Just had a picture I took reach the 100 ♥ milestone on instagram! Thought I could share it here. :)

A photo posted by ∇ (@delvispresley) on Feb 16, 2016 at 5:13pm PST

It’s actually a picture I took in 2013 during my Erasmus experience. More specifically, when I was doing a roundtrip to a music festival in Ísafjörður, Iceland.

Great video with Anthony Goldbloom (founder, and CEO of Kaggle) on the insights on statistical learning that Kaggle has been obtaining from its community (around 450 000 data scientists competing!).

The talk adreeses some techniques that seem to be tendencial winners in machine learning problems.