2012 – 2016: Columbia University, NYC
These are a short highlight reel of my hackathon and research days at Columbia University, where I pursued a major in Computer Science at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Devfest (Feb 2014)
My first hackathon, aka my first opportunity to test my tech skills outside of a classroom setting. We were awarded Most Technically Challenging Hack by Andreessen Horowitz, for building a 3D Wikipedia explorer using Latent-Dirichlet Allocation.
Pictured: 3hrs of sleep and a whole codebase later.
What did I learn: Linear algebra for defining graphical placements. I also learned that sleep is necessary although scarce and that redbull+pizza really does give you wings.
HackMIT (Oct 2014)
This was my first hardware hackathon. I had built a few bots using Lego NXTG before, but never anything with raw cardboard, motors and the Arduino Mega. Most of my contribution was connecting the C++ API’s of the Myo Armband to signals that the Arduino received. We didn’t win anything for this, but the Myo developer evangelist who took this video was very supportive, as you can see below.
What did I learn: Overusing a motor can burn through cardboard, and cause last minute demo failures. I also learned that Boston is wicked cold, but hackathons are great places to make friends outside of a school community.
HackMIT (Oct 2015)
My last, and most stressful hackathon. We spent hours of the night creating video footage of ourselves that we could test on. Our team was awarded third place overall for creating this Kalman filter that could identify human figures in video footage.
Pictured: My team with the prize. I still believe the check number is a code but haven’t been able to break it.
What did I learn: Data creation and data science are far more integral to solving Machine Learning problems than I had thought before.
Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) program hosted at UCLA ( Summer 2015)
We worked with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in using Computer Vision algorithms to identify foot chases from body-camera footage. We presented our paper at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in 2016. The same paper was later accepted and published in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Undergraduate Journal.
Our work with collecting the data led us to tours of 911 centers, learning the dynamics of a police helicopter and shadowing a shift with LAPD Air Patrol.
Pictured: Student researcher presenting her first poster.
What did I learn: Conducting research using sensitive data while program managing the project at the same time. I also learned how to work with non-academic stakeholders (such as senior police officers) to make our research process as transparent as possible.
