Research Experiences: 

Department of Sociology Research Assistant, Computational Social Science, January 2020-May 2020, January 2021-Present

In the spring semester of my first year, I joined a computational social science project through the Translational Data Analytics Institute under graduate students Peter Choi and Erik Axxe. This project focused on researching the significance of race and skin-tone on the internet, using a variety of large databases, as well as Python facial recognition scripts that were trained to accurately identify the skin-tone of someone in a photo. This research experience was my first introduction to doing real data analytics work, and I developed my data-oriented Python skills using Jupyter Notebook. I was introduced to a wide variety of new data analytics topics and languages, including R, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, facial recognition, and more. This experience helped me realize my interest in computational social science, and specifically the application of data analytics in the sociology field for research. I am hoping to continue to research in this field and develop my senior research thesis on a computational social science project, and plan on continuing to work under Erik and Peter this next year.

Now, in 2021, I am continuing to work with Erik and Peter on the final parts of the research project, including writing the research paper and creating the DCiFR software to publish with it, of which I am the first author. I have worked on coding this interface for most of the semester, and strengthened my Python and software development skills, and was able to learn about how to use the PyQt GUI package effectively. The interface will allow for users to upload either one image or multiple image, and runs DeepFace, a deep learning algorithm, on those images, to produce a CSV results file of the attributes for which the user selected. This paper and software will be published sometime soon, most likely this summer, as we continue to work on the project after the semester has finished.

Internship Experiences:

Garyfallidis Research Group (GRG), May 2020-Present: Software Development Intern

This summer, I joined GRG to work as a software development intern for the FURY project, working on developing tutorials, new features, and reviewing code. FURY is an open-source Python library for 3D visualization, used for scientific research across the globe. FURY was developed to simplify 3D visualization and animation in Python for the DIPY project, another open-source Python package for medical and scientific visualization, specifically computational neuroanatomy and brain imaging. Currently, I am still involved in the GRG group, editing and looking over recent FURY pull requests, as well as reviewing and editing a variety of papers that have or are in the works of being published. This experience has allowed me to develop my software development skills, and I now feel confident in my ability to use Python. Working with a large research group from a variety of locations also helped me learn about online version control, and I became proficient in using Git remotely and GitHub. I was able to apply my learnings from both Linear Algebra and Calculus III to visualize new shapes and prisms in three dimensions, and learned about texture mapping, timers, and camera movement to create animated scenes in Python.