UMass Amherst People Finder

Aaron Arsenault





        Aaron wrote a program in the summer of 2003 based on a nonlinear least squares fitting originally developed by Marquardt.  He implemented the method in C code source adding the necessary components to make the code loop through and obtain correct values.  The code source reads in data points and determines the best fitting parameter constants for a particular curve equation fitting.  The program was originally used to fit a sigmoid function to a set of data points. He used the same code source to implement the fitting of a damping sineozoidal equation represented by:

        The equation was to be fitted for (meaning to determine the equation parameters) actual oscillations of various materials which were levitated in an ESL (Electro Static Levitator) and excited to produce dampening oscillations. By fitting the equation to the data, various material properties could be found, including surface tension.  After writing the code source to implement the new equation, the code was then merged with an existing LabView program that Professor Hyers had developed to manually fit a dampening equation to the data by hand.  The C code source was implemented within the LabView program to provide a quick, consistent automated fitting of the data.