Preconditioning adjusts the state of a model to {expedite, improve, stabilize} convergence of an optimization procedure, typically by adjusting the gradient in the update rule with the inverse of the Hessian or improving the condition number of a matrix whose spectrum affects convergence.

Built a JetBot + an exploration and novice implementation of motion planning on said JetBot. This computational game theory project marked my first foray into optimization and a glimpse of its power muahahaha. It ain’t exquisite but it was heading in the right direction.

StoneAnno is my first published first-authorship paper, presenting at SPIE 2022. With the long-term goal of fully-automated robotic endoscopic surgery, we built a dataset of endoscopic kidney stone removal videos and investigated U-Net, U-Net++, and DenseNet for the segmentation task. We found a U-Net++ model that consistently achieves >0.9 Dice score, with low loss, and produces realistic, convincing segmentations. Moving forward, I am implementing our model on hardware for deployment in ORs, as a part of my master’s thesis, and I helped Dr. Kavoussi submit an R21 grant in October 2021.

Although it will be published after StoneAnno, this shape analysis is my first completed research project and technically my first first-authorship, submitted to Brain. I wrote code in R and MATLAB to fit LMMs to the cortical data from T1w MRI of HD patients and then performed statistical analyses on the results using SurfStat and random field theory. We found that, with a novel method for measuring gyrification, LGI uniquely detects changes in the insula.

Neural network automated verification of a VAE and SegNet using NNV. Although neural networks are promising, they are easily confused, particularly if the input domain is perturbed. In this project, I demonstrate the robustness of MNIST-trained VAE and SegNet against varying brightness attacks.

Visualizing the resulting link prediction graph from a temporal graph network on a Wikipedia dataset using Observable and d3.js.

Implementation of face detection / following and vSLAM on a Ryze Tello using its MATLAB toolkit.

I fell in love with dimensionality reduction when I was learning statistical ML. Since I also study neuroscience, I wanted to practice the art at the intersection of my interests. I compared the 3D projections of a 53-dimensional neurophysiology dataset produced by PCA and a shallow autoencoder.