A Pale Blue Dot

Intro

I was born on September 16th, 1998 in Toledo, Ohio. I grew up in Monroe, Michigan and always had a passion for science and a fascination with the latest, coolest technology. Part of me thinks this was influenced by my obsession with science fiction video games growing up, or it could have been inspired by all the times I watched the Iron Man movies with my dad. Either way, computers became my thing, and that’s how I found myself studying Computer Engineering at the University of Michigan. I love the versatility of the major and the fact that there are so many ways you can improve people's lives through technology. Now, I work as a software engineering intern at Mcity, the university’s autonomous vehicle test facility. I am also involved on campus as Vice President of Communications for our IEEE student branch, a Student Ambassador for the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, and a member of MRun, the university's club running team. After graduation, I will be joining Amazon as a full time Software Development Engineer.

Projects

This section is for my previous projects with a brief description of what they are/do.

Personal Website

This website has been a fun learning experience since I started with very little experience in HTML, JS, or CSS. I started with a template from html5up.net (there are more details in the webpages' source code) and began digging through the code to modify things and make it fit my own style. The picture above depicts the old website compared to the newest one.

Catanalyzer

Catanalyzer was our final project for my upper level computer vision course. The purpose was to use both deep learning and classic computer vision algorithms to analyze the state of a Settlers of Catan board from live video input and then overlay valuable information onto the video feed. This was intended as a fun supplement for experienced Catan players or a resource for new players.

Diag Defender

The Diag Defender was the final project for our embedded systems lab. It used a PixyCam mounted on the front to detect colorful objects and move the motors to chase them out of the area surrounding a block M on the ground. It also used another PixyCam with an IR sensor attachment to keep track of IR LEDs mounted on the ceiling and stay within its predetermined bounds.

Mcity Video Processor

My work at Mcity has primarily been implementing a pipeline in AWS Batch to process video footage from the self-driving shuttles. The pipeline runs a computer vision library called YOLO (You Only Look Once) with an underlying neural network called Darknet on a specified number of frames per video and uploads the labeled footage back to the source folder. Above is an example of YOLO's object detection on a picture from my first marathon.

Search Engine

One of my favorite projects was also one of the biggest I've ever worked on. I was part of a team of 6 students that built a search engine from the ground up in C/C++. Greple was the result of many sleepless nights in the library and can return results from an index of over 3 million documents. My work primarily focused on the implementation of the web crawler, query parser, and constraint solver components of the engine.

Zookeeper

The Zookeeper project was practice in implementing Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) algorithms. The project was zoo themed, and this led to different scenarios like finding the most optimal route to feed the animals or the most efficient cyclical route for water distribution.

Log Manager

This project mainly involved constructing a system where the user inputs a file containing log entries and then uses the program to easily filter them. These excerpt lists were constructed using timestamp, category, and/or keyword searches on the logs within the system and then returned to the user.

Mine All Mine

For the Mine All Mine project, the setting is a grid (the mine) filled with rubble. The numbers in the grid represent the difficulty level of taking that path, and the goal of the project was to use a priority queue to find the path of least resistance for escaping the mine. There is also an option to have the program print relevant statistics, like the median rubble difficulty shown in the picture above.

Letterman

Letterman has the ability to take a custom dictionary of words as input, then uses a pathfinding algorithm to determine if there is a path between two specified words. These intermediate words have to have small differences - such as an added, subtracted, or changed letter - and must be valid words (in the context of the dictionary that the user gives).

Piazza Post Classifier

This Piazza post classification system was implemented using machine learning and natural language processing techniques. The program takes a dataset of prelabeled Piazza posts and learns by creating connections between common keywords and their labels. Unlabeled posts can be entered into the program and it will predict the appropriate label based on what it learned during training.

RPN Calculator

A Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) calculator is one that takes the arguments first, then the operation that is to be performed on them. This is a bit difference from today's common calculators, where the operation typically goes inbetween the arguments. For example, 7+4-3 would be written in RPN as 7,4+3-. This calculator was implemented using a stack data structure that I wrote.

Euchre Simulator

Euchre is a very popular card game among midwesterners. This project - which has gained a bit of a reputation in the University of Michigan's EECS department - simulates a Euchre game between 4 players. It has the ability to change the computer players' strategies, and there is an option of allowing a human to play the game as well.

Content-Aware Image Resizing

This project uses a seam-carving algorithm to calculate which pixels are the least important in an image, and then removes them. This allows the user to resize images in a way that changes the aspect ratio, but does so without distorting the image or losing valuable content.

Wind-Powered Turbine

My ENGR100 team fabricated a tri-bladed, savonius style wind turbine over the course of a semester. We went through the entire design process, with several reviews and prototyping stages. At the end, we brought our turbine to the roof of the Space Research Building and were able to generate enough power to support a lightbulb.

Travel

There's more to life than just Michigan.

Pittsburgh 2019

At the beginning of August, I had the opportunity to go to a leadership conference in Pittsburgh with some of the other IEEE officers. It was really cool connecting with some of the tech industry's leaders hearing from them about topics like AI and virtual reality. We also had some time to go explore the city (and I tried pizza with potato slices on it???).

New York City 2019

I technically only had 2 overnight layovers in NYC, but I took a New York taxi across Queens so I'm counting it as a visit. Landing at JFK airport was such a relieving feeling after a long 6 weeks overseas, and the city from above was breathtaking. Also, there are a surprising amount of people that sleep overnight on the floor of airports.

London 2019

On one of the last weekends in Spain, I took a side trip to London to visit an old friend who also happened to be traveling around Europe. It was nice to speak English instead of using my broken Spanish, and we managed to cram a lot of fun touristy activities into a short weekend. Some of the highlights include a Shakespearean comedy at the globe theatre, riding a 2 story bus, and eating cheesecake in Hyde Park.

Pamplona 2019

Unfortunately, we had to leave the beach in San Sebastián behind, but thankfully there were a lot of things to do in Pamplona. The whole city felt like a summer-long party leading up to San Fermín (the running of the bulls). We also took a course about language and culture of Spain that gave me a perspective I wouldn't have gotten in America. Meeting students from the university was awesome, and I feel like I learned more Spanish in 3 weeks than I had in my 5 years of studying prior.

Paris 2019

During the transition weekend between our time in San Sebastián and Pamplona, 4 of my friends and I took a trip to Paris despite only one of us speaking any French whatsoever. The apartment we booked originally got cancelled, and the company moved us to a building that was almost a block away from the Eiffel Tower! We walked nearly 14 miles in one day, saw the Mona Lisa in person, and watched Ratatouille while drinking french wine and eating cheese and crackers. 10/10 weekend, would recommend.

San Sebastián 2019

After my little impromptu vacation in Burgos, I finally met up with my study abroad classmates and we went to San Sebastián. It is honestly the most beautiful place I have ever been, and I get all nostalgic thinking about all the time I spent on the beach with my friends. Also, every Thursday there is a thing called Pintxo Pote where the bars have a drink/snack combo for 2 euros and everyone going bar hopping. It was amazing, I still can't believe San Sebastián is real.

Burgos 2019

Due to some cancelled flights (thanks RyanAir), I was homeless for a few days in Spain. Except not really, I ended up staying in Airbnbs and hostels in Burgos, a city that my aunt had stayed at during her study abroad in Spain. Being nearly a year out of practice with my Spanish, being alone was absolutely terrifying at first. Thankfully, the people of Burgos (especially my airbnb host, Marc) were very kind and helped me out a lot.

San Francisco 2019

Over spring break I had the opportunity to visit San Francisco with the university's ECE department for some company tours. It'd been nearly a decade since I last visited California, and I'd never been to the bay area. The company visits were super insightful (I was especially impressed by Intel's headquarters) and I fell in love with the city, crazy traffic and all. I will absolutely be returning some day soon.

Chicago 2018

Once I had a break from summer courses (shout out to differential equations), I went on a trip with my best friend's family to see him perform in Chicago. We don't see him too often since he moved out there to go to school for acting, but it was really awesome to catch up and have him show me around the city. Also, if for some reason you're a recruiting agent on my website, his name is Curtis Jewell and he is a fantastic singer, dancer, and actor.

Resume

Contact

Elements

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