I wanna be something.

Welcome! This is my repository of projects I've done and experiences I've had :)

The bullet points:
- Bachelor's in Computing, Math, and Analytics
- Music lover and foreign languages enthusiast
- 500+ hours of student leadership and volunteering


Featured projects

eeg

Towards EEG Signal Processing Optimization

 By Mercy - 10/04/2024
1st place at the Camp QMIND Pitch Competition 2024. A proposal on using EEG limitations to make EEG technology more accessible. View full work here.
nnmf

Classifying Tumor Cells with Mass Spectrometry Data

 By Mercy - 04/17/2024
Undergraduate Research Project with Professor Randy Ellis. Analyzing the effectivness of non-negative matrix factorization for classifying skin cells.


What people are saying


My volunteer organizations

my organizations

Other stuff I've done

Looking for Master's programs

I am currently applying to Master's programs across Canada (and potentially Europe and the USA), looking to enhance my understanding of NLP. I would appreciate any advice or chances to connect!

Hyperloop 24/25: Optimizing travel routes with genetic algorithms

Currently the AI team manager under the R&D division of the Queen's Hyperloop Design Team (QHDT). Overseeing 6 undergraduates with the goal of presenting at Hyperloop Global and European Hyperloop Week. We're in the brainstorming and planning process of our project right now!

QMIND 24/25: EEG Thought-to-Text with NLP

1st place at the Camp QMIND Pitch Competition (Blog post here).
Technical project manager overseeing 5 undergraduates. We want to be able to read your mind with an EEG.

COMPSA 24/25: The Academics x Professional Development Crossover Episode

I am running the COMPSA Coffee Chats series under the Academics portfolio and industry-related events under the Professional Development portfolio. (Blog post here)

My Coffee Chats series has hosted (and will host) professors Erin Meger, Ting Hu, Hesham ElSawy, Carolyn Lamb, Christian Muise, Randy Ellis, and more. These are more casual events where students get to talk to professors in a non-academic setting, and where professors can talk about anything they want - from graph theory to survivng academia.

I have helped run networking and info sessions at Google and Manulife, and currently planning an undergraduate interview workshop and alumni mixer. I'm always on the lookout for industry connections!

CUCAI 24/25: Looking out for AI speakers and student partners!

The Canadian Undergraduate Conference on AI (CUCAI) is the biggest of its kind, and I'm in charge of finding the current most interesting voices in AI. We've hosted speakers from Google, OpenAI, Cohere, AWS, Apple, Intel, and more - including the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton!

I'm also the main point of contact for student partners, as we have a design showcase of 40+ AI projects. We bring together students from UofT and Waterloo all the way to the University of Victoria.

AI Developer for Legal LLM Development

I scraped 100+ dense law documents to be integrated into OpenJustice, a chatbot that provides legal information created by the Queen's Conflict Analytics Lab. These included policies and regulations from Canada, the USA, Australia, and France, some dating back to the 1800s. I used Pinecone to store the ~150k vectors for retrieval augmentation generation.

AMESC: Starting a European music blog

Me and my friends (both local and international) started blogging and vlogging coverage of the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest. For most, it was our first time coordinating video production, article writing, and social media management. However, we gained over 100k total views during our very first coverage season!

We're called AMESC, and you can find us here.

Undergrad Research: Cell Classification with Matrix Methods

Supervised by Professor Randy Ellis.
What characteristics separate a benign cell from a tumor cell? Identifying cancer in tissue samples can be accomplished using the power of data classification techniques. Using mass spectrometry data, we used non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF) to classify types of cells. (Blog post here)

Reinforcement Learning: Snake

Me and my friends made a RL program to optimize the game Snake. In the game environment, we compared the Q-Learning and SARSA methods. (Blog post here)

Discord Bot Mania

I have an army of Discord bots. One puts you in jail, another teaches you writing scripts, and another one keeps you updated on your favorite artist's social media. (Blog post here)

Working with an international translation group

We've translated over 300 videos of (mostly) Slovenian content, which landed us on national media and paved the way for international collaborations between radio hosts, bloggers, photographers, and more. (Blog post here)

I basically run the operations side of things! Here's a little sample of stuff I do:
- Developed utility bots on Discord to facilitate workflows
- Analyzed audio and text data to finetune machine translation models
- Website developer (HTML, CSS (Bootstrap), JS)
- French-English translation and Slovenian-English proofreading
- Hire, onboard, and organize 60+ translators from 20 countries
- Managed social media accounts, reaching over 600k+ impressions
- Lead coordinator for graphic design and video editing

Hyperloop 23/24: (1st place at EHW) A Multi-Criteria Approach for Hyperloop Route Implementation in Canada and Beyond

1st place at European Hyperloop Week 2024 - Best Socio-Economic Research Paper.
We used pathfinding algorithms to find the most optimal geographical route between two points given physical and economic data. (Blog post here)

QMIND 23/24: Empowering students in AI

I taught students AI and mentored 6 technical NLP project managers (each of whom supervised 3-5 students), one of which went on to present at the AWS firm day. I ran code jams, project presentation nights, and mini-hackathons. I was also a judge at CUCAI 2024.

That time I went to Slovenia on a whim

I'd never been happier. (Blog post here)

COMPSA 22/23: Being a co-president for Computing students

I represented 1500+ students and ran 20+ initiatives to help Computing undergrads. I did a lot more too. (Blog post here)

QMIND 22/23: Security Vulnerability Detection with Transformers

Technical project manager for 4 students. We created and compared models to classify whether a PHP file was vulnerable or not based on CWE standards, and presented at CUCAI 2023. (Blog post here)

Google exploreCSR: Applying ML to cybersecurity research in autonomous vehicles

Mentored by Dr. Lama Moukahal and sponsored by Google.
Topic: Driver-Centric Vehicles to Intelligent Mechanical Devices

I had my first dip into academia practically by chance - but this was the turning point where I finally started considering pursuing research. I analyzed cybersecurity papers, learned about software vulnerabilities, and made a ML model to determine characteristics of secure software. (Blog post here)

COMPSA 21/22: My HR gateway

I had no idea what COMPSA was, or what an internal affairs director did, and I applied because the student government role I had in high school was similar to the position. My executives' leap of faith turned me into the leader, organizer, and even enabler that I am today.

Since then, I've been involved in the organization as not only a director, but also an executive and volunteer. This organization has defined my sense of community within Queen's Computing that I doubt I would have received anywhere else.

Graduating during the pandemic

Crashed out as a jazz band section leader, STEM club founder, student council executive, trivia team captain, and GSA club representative though. No prom, no graduation, and no final spring concert. Still haven't really processed it.

List of Hackathon Projects

- hackHer 2024
- QHacks 2024
- QHacks 2023
- hackHer 2022
- QHacks 2022
- Hack the 6ix 2021
- Neighborhood Hacks 2021
(Blog post here)

List of Teaching Assistantships

- CISC 371, Nonlinear Data Analytics - Randy Ellis
- CISC 124, Intro to Computer Science 2 - Paul Allison
- CISC 352, Artifical Intelligence - Christian Muise
- CISC 203, Discrete Math 2 - Erin Meger
- CISC 223, Software Specifications - Kai Salomaa
- CISC 124, Intro to Computer Science 2 - Burton Ma
- CISC 121, Intro to Computer Science 1 - Robin Dawes
- Math Investigations - Peter Taylor

List of Courses Taken

Selected courses:
- Reinforcement Learning
- Evolutionary Algorithms and Optimization
- Artificial Intelligence
- Linear Data Analytics
- Nonlinear Data Analytics
- Advanced Data Analytics
- Information Theory

Other credentials and fun facts

Language nerding:
- My French is around the B2 level
- As such, my Italian and Spanish abilities dangle by two threads: Romance cognates and chronic media consumption
- My German is very basic (but my favorite pandemic movie was a film designed to help learn German)
- My Slovenian is even more basic (and my training data is slightly biased)
- I can read Greek and Cyrillic
- I have attempted to learn Hangul, Devanagari, and the Japanese scripts
- The first non-Canadian language I wanted to learn was Dutch

Music enjoying:
- Been playing piano since 6
- Been playing violin since 11
- Been playing ukulele since 13
- Been playing bass since 14
- Been playing guitar since 14 (but I am a bass supremacist)
- Got a drum kit at 14 (I am very lucky)
- Got into a performing arts high school for clarinet playing. I did not keep playing the clarinet.
- Various other percussion instruments player, like the timpani, claves, and vibraslap
- I have like 70% perfect pitch
- I prefer songs in certain keys (1/2/3 sharps or 3/4 flats)
- Yes, I was a band kid in high school
- Yes, I miss it more than anything
- Yes, I am open to jamming :D

Even more fun facts:
- My current physical activity of interest is rock climbing
- I always have like 10+ Wikipedia tabs open
- My second favorite soccer player is Messi
- I used to do lots of realistic pencil and charcoal portraits!
- If I was a Pokémon I'd be Gengar :D

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MD 2024 || Made with love <3