Table of Contents
- About Me
- About This Site
- About My Work
3.1 Projects
3.2 Research Interests
3.3 My Mentors at GVSU - CV
About Me
I am a senior at Grand Valley State University studying computer science with a minor in mathematics and employed as an undergraduate researcher for the Applied Computing Institute. Currently, I am researching methods and programs to facilitate biomedical research through data compression and machine learning. I’m also the president of the Computing Club of GVSU, leading dozens of students in gaining technical and interpersonal skills for the world of computing. When I’m not working on research, school, or club, I enjoy spending time with friends and family, playing soccer, reading, and mixing drinks.
I had not even considered research as an option going into my junior year of college, but I had received an offer for a research position with a new professor. After working with my mentor for a few months and the opportunity to work with other researchers, I knew that research was the right path for me. Since then, I have been enjoying my time conducting research and have only confirmed my decision to pursue self-improvement through doing the best research possible.
About This Site
This website is a tool to help me learn and grow. One of the primary goals is for me to just have a space to write about academic topics and compare with others to help me improve my writing skills. I also use this website as a general landing point for my professional work as I want to show off my projects and skills on this website where I can. One of the ways in which I add to this website is by reading papers in computing and putting down my thoughts and questions about the paper. This is a way for me to gain a stronger backgroud in computing, help me get better at reading academic papers, and to start building a potential relationship with the authors I admire.
About My Work
I currently conduct research for the Applied Computing Institute (ACI) of Grand Valley State University (GVSU) as a resident and undergraduate researcher.
Projects
My first project was the creation of a sparse data compression library called IVSparse. I developed in collaboration with my research partner Seth Wolfgang and other researcher Marc Tunnel. IVSparse is a library designed for the compression of redundant sparse data by adding value and index compression techniques to redundant data patterns. This results in two propriotary compression formats known as Value Compressed Sparse Column (VCSC) and Index and Value Compressed Sparse Column (IVCSC). The library is written in C++ and is designed to be used in a variety of applications. The project can be found on GitHub.
The project I’m currently working on is Probabilistic Modeling of Genomics Data with Variational Autoencoders (VAE) but I’m still in the early stages of the project. This is an extension of the work we have been doing for the last year on IVSparse since we hope to use it as a building block for working with genetic data.
Research Interests
I am deeply invested in high-performance computing (HPC) and interdisciplinary research involving HPC. Firstly, I love to optimize; understanding a codebase or even a single section of code to find ways to optimize the code for specific applications is really fun. The ability to leverage tradeoffs in an algorithm or method to glean some way to optimize further is a skill I want to gain a more intuitive understanding of as I grow as a researcher.
I have gained a few interests due to my research projects: data compression, and machine learning. Data compression is a very interesting optimization problem where it’s all about making intelligent tradeoffs in some greater purpose which is fun to solve. Machine learning is a newly acquired research interest as I have started working with it for a new project. The incredible power that modern machine learning provides is awe-inspiring, and imagining the coming prospects of the field, especially in conjunction with HPC, makes me really excited for current and future projects!