Undergraduate Talks, Slides, and Writeups
A compilation of some presentations, talks, slides, writeups, and final projects that I have done over the years as a student at Brandeis.
Group Projects:
The HaSoGa Community Arts Center The final group project for my Modern Architecture class in fall 2016. We developed an architectural manifesto, a physical model of a community arts center that follows the ideals of our manifesto, and a writeup about our manifesto, the design of the building, and its use case.
Designing Conversations to Encourage Collaborative Learning A group project for my Computational Cognitive Science class in spring 2016. My partner and I explored how to encourage meaningful, productive conversations among students using online collaborative learning tools. Using data from our class’ online collaborative homework platform, we analyzed interactions between students in the class and redesigned the interface for the platform based on what we learned from the conversations.
Boston Accessibility Presentation The final presentation for an independent study I did with three other Brandeis students in fall 2015. We partnered with the City of Boston to research the problem of Boston’s old, beautiful, and completely inaccessible streets to people with mobility impairments. The accompanying website we developed to showcase our work is here.
Artificial Life Presentation A presentation for the Artificial Life class I took in spring 2016 explaining the paper Creating High-Level Components with a Generative Representation for Body-Brain Evolution written by Gregory Hornby and Jordan Pollack. The paper has some really neat and interesting AI research!
Solo Projects
For classes
Clouds That Think: Applications of Machine Learning Techniques for Elastic Databases My senior thesis presentation.
Building Analysis of Brandeis’ Shapiro Science Center A paper for my Modern Architecture class in fall 2016.
Perception of Archaeology in National Geographic from 1926 - 1936 A presentation for my Archaeology class (Archaeology in Politics, Media, and Society) in spring 2016.
Gravitational Radiation presentation A presentation for my Astrophysics class, back in spring 2015. My initial plan, when I first came to Brandeis, was to triple major in physics, computer science, and math - a triple major I lovingly referred to as the trifecta of death. Fortunately for my mental and physical health, I decided that the trifecta of death was not for me when I was in the middle of my sophomore year, and dropped my physics major down to a minor. This was the last physics class I took to complete the minor.
Misc.
Design/Web Dev MakerLab Training The training I ran before leaving my job at the MakerLab, at the end of my senior year.
Design Thoughts with Sofiya During the last two years of undergrad, I hosted several “Design Thoughts with Sofiya” events through BITMAP. The purpose of the presentations were to get a group of people together, who had varying levels of experience with design, and get them engaged with thinking about the designed world around them. As such, a portion of the presentations were always interactive, wherein the group critiqued websites, branding, and graphic design, and discussed what particular aspects of a design worked and didn’t work.
Creating Inclusive Hacker Communities (a keynote presentation, not a google slides presentation) A presentation given at Boston’s Cocoaheads meetup about how to plan a university hackathon with the goal of strengthening an inclusive community. This was the first non-school-related presentation I gave! I’ve done several talks about Codestellation at local events since then, but unfortunately I don’t have the slides for those.