Working on the Publishing Team at Academia.edu.

The Cal Poly DxHub works with public sector organizations to prototype solutions for complicated problems by leveraging AWS and other innovative technologies.

I worked on the Cacao Traceability Project, with the goal of increasing transparency in the cacao supply chain and encouraging sustainable farming practices. I developed an algorithm to detect deforestation near cacao farms outside of the primary Amazon rainforest region in Colombia. I achieved this by using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery, processed via Alaska Satellite Facility's HyP3 pipeline to handle radiometric terrain calibration, and a Random Forest Classifier to detect forest cover trained using existing tree cover datasets as labels. I advocated for the use of SAR imagery over optical imagery to avoid cloud cover, which was common in the area of interest. AWS was used to handle data storage (S3) and processing/classification (Lambda, SQS, EC2). By designing and training our model from scratch, I saved the DxHub thousands of dollars over hiring a consulting firm to accomplish the same task.

The Cal Poly Deep GIS Research Lab is investigating the applications of machine learning within the field of remote sensing.

I worked on the Palm Oil project in collaboration with NASA's SERVIR-Amazonia branch with the goal of developing an open-source tool to automatically detect palm oil plantations in tropical rainforests. I developed routines for automating the downloading and processing of imagery for building the data stacks, which consist of a combination of SAR, optical, and tree-cover data. Additionally, I helped write a set of Jupyter notebooks documenting the code and walking non-technical users through the flow.

I also worked on the Burn Severity project, which developed a convolutional neural network to automatically classify structures as burned or unburned after wildfires caused damage in the region. I took over the project and increased the efficiency of the dataset preprocessing, allowing the entire dataset to be used. By utilizing the extra training data and altering the structure of the CNN, I was able to increase the accuracy of the model by around 5%.

I designed a new website flow and database model using React, Ruby on Rails, and PostgreSQL to gather information about coauthors a user has written papers with, and added a new email to direct users to that flow. I incorporated this data into the system that matches newly found papers to potential users, improving its accuracy and leading to an increase in the number of papers uploaded to the site. I also designed an A/B test to measure the performance of the new system and presented my initial findings. Throughout the internship, I learned best software engineering practices, including testing code (via unit tests, frontend mockups, and deploying to Q/A servers), deploying to production, monitoring code (by tracking metrics and setting alerts on various dashboards), working on a large codebase, and coordinating with a team using the Agile devleopment lifecycle.

The Cal Poly Music Production Union is a collective of artists from a broad variety of genres. We host concerts, songwriting competitions, open mics, and put together an annual collaborative album, among other activities.

As club president, I was in charge of setting the club vision and overseeing the execution. I set a goal to increase the social cohesion of the club and promote social justice. I accomplished this by planning several social events, hosting a BIPOC/Femme open mic night, and organizing Songs in Solidarity, a multi-day interactive livestream event that raised ~$400 for R.A.C.E. Matters SLO. This required being an effective leader of the officer board and I learned to delegate tasks, set priorities, make compromises, facilitate communication, and oversee logistics of complicated events, like our end of year on campus music festival. While our membership had declined during the pandemic, I helped grow the club to over 100 members and recruited new officers to replace our mostly graduating officer board to ensure its long-term survival.