Projects

In 2020, city and state governments across the United States placed restrictions on different sectors of local economies, resulting in an economic recession with differing levels of unemployment and across states and industries. Employment salaries and rates varied significantly between remote white-collar workers and in person blue-collar workers. While Covid-19 has amplified the wage differentials between different industries, such differentials existed prior to the pandemic. Factors such as geographic location, company, occupation, industry, and work history all influence salaries. Previous research has focused on minimum wage increases, interstate comparison of manufacturing production, and work history to determine future jobs. This thesis built models of previously collected employment data and analyzed the impact of variables in determining hourly salary. Linear, lasso, and ridge regression models were used to consider the differences. The models examined the causal relationships and predicted outcomes for occupations in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

In CS 326: Web Programming, I partnered with Christian Daher, Bhogesh Maddirala, and Matthew Lehoullier to create a website with the intent of helping people to make better financial decisions. Upon running a search on the website homepage (http://www.dbtbt.com/), the user will be presented with a number of items from Amazon.com, along with similarly-priced stock options. The idea is to encourage the user to invest their free money for the future, rather than wasting it on frivolous purchases. This addresses a real world problem as many Americans do not make educated financial decisions. This project used Node.js (backend and auxiliary socket server), React (frontend), Apache, Nginx (reverse proxies), Amazon EC2, GCP Compute Engine (hosting), Amazon RDS using MySQL (database), and Amazon Route 53 (DNS).

During the HackUMass VII competition, my team (Henry Cheung, Veronica Gusev, and Nhan Le) built a Raspberry Pi powered camera timelapse system. The ardunio ran a python script that controlled a DSLR camera. This script took a time interval and sent it to the DSLR, received images were compiled and encoded into a video

During the Fall 2018 semester, I took CICS 290M: MAKE: A HANDS-ON INTRODUCTION TO PHYSICAL COMPUTING. In this class, I partnered with Jeffrey Carr and we built an arduino powered smart window for our final project. The arduino had a photoresistor that would raise and lower a servo powered shade depending on the amount of light detected.

Over the course of the past few years I have been perfecting my own desktop setup. Tired of using slugish prebuilt computers, I built my own!

During the HackUMass VI competition, my team (Jeffrey Carr, Henry Cheung, & Steven Yen) built an arduino powered alarm system. The alarm system had a distance proximity sensor that calculated based off of echo location. Based off of the distance readings, a neopixel ring would light up more pixels the closer an object was to the sensor. There was three levels of colors and if an object got too close, the neopixel ring would turn red.

During senior year of high school, my team (Matthew Pugsley, Katie O'Neil, Laura Wang, and myself) competed in our final National History Day comptetition. We researched Gertrude Bell and her legacy to current Middle Eastern affairs.

In 2016, my team (Matthew Pugsley, Katie O'Neil, Laura Wang, and myself) researched the life of L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of Scientology. Our exhbit won 3rd place at the Massachusetts South Shore regional History Day competition.

Sophomore year of high school, I researched the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Using satelite data that was released to the public, I calculated a possible final path and coordinates of a proposed crash site in the Indian Ocean. My project won 1st place at my high school science fair before I moved on to regional and state science fairs.

For the National History Day contest of 2015, my team (Lily Tang, Matthew Pugsley, Amanda Ramos, and Caitlin Leach) researched and created an exhibit around the flawed court system that resulted in the Salem Witch Trials. Our exhibit won 1st place at the the South Shore Regional competition and won an Honorable Mention at the Massachusetts History Day contest.