Major Projects
Below are several major projects I've worked on throughout my education. These are projects that I believe best demonstrate my range of knowledge and abilities.
Irony Classification of Online Dialogue
MS Thesis Project
Sept - Dec 2015 | UC Santa Cruz | Santa Cruz, CA
Abstract: The use of irony, or sarcasm, in online social media dialogue is a challenge to natural language processing systems aiming to analyze and gather information from online discussions. This project extended previous works on sarcasm by analyzing the effects of using different feature combinations and classifiers on the irony detection and classification tasks. The results showed that the inclusion of different feature sets improves the performance of new classifiers to varying degrees (when using SVM and JRip classifiers, not previously tested on the dataset).
I wrote scripts in Python to perform data processing/cleaning and feature extraction, and utilized the built-in classifiers in the Weka toolkit to perform my experiments. You can read the final paper here.
Imagine! Education Apps
Human-Computer Interaction Course Project
Jan - Mar 2015 | UC Santa Cruz | Santa Cruz, CA
Project goal: Create a product from scratch such that the process provides hands-on experience working with the ideas, methods, tools, and evaluation metrics learned in the course.
My team of three partnered with Imagine!, a Colorado-based nonprofit organization that provides support and assistance to people with disabilities, to create three web applications. Two applications are used to educate people with cognitive and development disabilities while the third application is used to entertain people with visual impairments. In addition to creating the game aspect of the applications, we added login capabilities so that users may save their results. The web applications were built using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and jQuery. Results were saved to a SQL database, which was accessed using PHP. All members of the team contributed evenly through the requirements gathering and prototyping stages of the project. We participated in weekly meetings with our client at Imagine! to assure that the products met the clients needs and expectations. I was personally responsible for creating the web application deliverables. User testing indicated a high level of satisfaction with our products.
You can view the website here. Below are some screenshots of the finished applications.
Slugs vs. Bugs
Mechatronics Course Project
Sept - Dec 2013 | UC Santa Cruz | Santa Cruz, CA
Project goal: Build a small autonomous robot that can effectively navigate a pre-determined field, entering through one gate and exiting through another within a specified time limit, while launching ping pong balls at "enemy" robots.
Working in a team of three, we successfully designed, assembled, and programmed a robot capable of meeting all requirements. I was personally responsible for designing the structure of the robot utilizing SolidWorks, and writing, in C, the event-driven program responsible for our robots’ behavior.
Concurrent Autonomous Vehicle Navigation
Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Project
June - Aug 2012 | DePauw University | Greencastle, IN
Project goal: Develop a system for multiple autonomous vehicles to navigate through a region and produce a map of the boundaries and obstacles.
Both a software approach and a hardware approach were taken to reach this goal. I personally built an autonomous vehicle capable of detecting, avoiding, and transmitting information about obstacles in its path utilizing infrared sensors, a microcontroller, and wireless communication.
Presentation of results: 22nd Annual Argonne Symposium for Undergraduates in Science, Engineering & Mathematics. View the poster here.