A busy quarter in San Diego.
School, a new internship, and my data science capstone project with General Atomics take up most of my time. Here's a little more about each, and what I'm making room for around them.
Finishing my degree
I'm in my final year of Data Science at UC San Diego, aiming to graduate in March. Alongside my capstone, I'm taking classes on the Civil War and public rhetoric. It's been a change of pace to spend more time reading and writing. Part of this writing class requires me to seek out new intellectual forms of media which has been very fun. I've greatly expanded my podcast horizons as of late, and I am now aware of a couple good blogs. Right now I'm enjoying Heavyweight, Ologies, and Radiolab.
I'm also thinking about what comes after school. I am steady applying to internships. Everyone around me is getting nepo'd in. Its frustrating.
Getting started at Skinny Gene
I recently started a Data and Program Analytics internship with the Skinny Gene Project, a nonprofit focused on diabetes prevention. I've been learning how the program works and where I can help. Recently I collected 74 million data points for a particular task. Whoops! I might have to scale back.
I'm interested in making the team's data easier to use and finding ways to save staff time.
Learning about fusion
My capstone group is studying the use of neural networks for predicting plasma transport in fusion reactors. My mentors are Igor from the San Diego Super Computer Center, and Jeff and Emily from General Atomics. Plasma transport describes how heat moves throughout the reactor. We want to keep that heat stable during a reactor run. Its possible to change the conditions of the reactor mid fusion run if you have a fast and accurate enough simulation model.
So far we've had some promising results using neural network ensembles to reproduce and at times exceed current literature. Theres a lot of promise in changing NN architecture and activation functions depending on the desired prediction. Im hoping we can make some real progress in this field! I'd love to see fusion become viable during my lifetime.
Away from the desk
I'm trying to keep going to the gym, cook decent meals, and make time for my friends, family, and partner while the quarter gets busy. I still like having a small software project to work on for myself. This website is one of them. It's so hard to balance everything!