Electric Zen Waterfountain

Spring 2008

To watch the video in action click here:

Carol of the Bells
or
Sonar Demo




Working with a group of 5, we made the 'mini-belagio'. Making an embedded system board, hooking up lights and fish pumps, and even sonar, we created an interactive Senior project.

People could control how the water moved based off of where they moved their hands.

The water and colors could also change based off of music.

This project began my passion for building art out of electronics.

Teacher for Presidents Leadership Class

Fall 2007, Spring 2008



Probably the most rewarding experience I have had is teaching the Presidents Leadership Class.

Now before you discount this as a Student Council, please take a look at our curriculum.

This class taught me how to make an actual change, build communities, measure effectiveness, and understand a global impact.

But instead of doing this theoretically, we read peer reviewed sources to learn. We go out and actually make the difference.

As a teacher, I worked with 10 of CU's top students each semester. Each week's lesson plan took me over 5 hours to make.

One week I gave the students 1 hour to make a real difference - they handed candy outside of classes.

Another week I asked my students to debate Cultural Relativism vs. Kant's Imperative (with the small twist that they had to argue the side they disagreed with)

I was not only a teacher, I was a friend. We did so many actiivities outside of class, and we still keep in touch.

I graded 100's of pages of papers and helped students think critically about the decisions they wanted to make.

High Speed Digital Design

Fall 2005, Spring 2006

Working with Dr. Melinda Piket-May, I spent a year researching electric magnetic wave simulations. I received: $1000 Learning Opportunity Grant and an $800 UROP grant to work on a programming environment for complex EM analysis. I used the LC programming language, which was developed as part of the CRAY institute.

University of Colorado at Boulder

2004-2008

I graduated the University of Colorado at Boulder in May 2008.

With a degree in Electrical Computer Engineering and a certificate in the Study and Practice of Leadership .

• My final transcript can be found here.
• I was the only one in my major to graduate summa cum laude with a 3.82
• I took various graduate level classes, including Embedded Systems and DSP Lab
• I also took various classes outside of my focus including Spanish, Philosiphy, and Painting

Repairing Medical Equipment in Africa

Spring 2008

Power Point Presentation

Business Plan

After visiting Africa over break, I had to a chance to ask Dr. Jackson, CEO of Project: CURE what I, a motivated engineer, could do to help build a stable infrastructure in Africa. Dr. Jackson proceeded to tell me how Project: CURE leads the non-profit medical industry by donating over 40 million dollars of medical equipment to Africa each year. That said, no economy in Africa exists medical equipment when it inevitably breaks. All across the continent, a broken health monitor is doorstop. Equipment that determines whether people live or die, is sitting in the clinic’s closets. Furthermore, the few people who know to fix medical equipment (rarer than even doctors) are transported out of the country through brain drain. Currently, the best way to fix a broken piece of equipment is to hope to get a new one donated soon. This is how I started my long term partnership with Project: CURE, dedicated to fixing a simple problem, no organization in Africa is keeping the medical industry sustainable. As Dr. Jackson puts it, “Repairing Medical Equipment in Africa is the number one problem that needs to be addressed today”.

Autonomous Robotic Control through BlueTooth

2005-2007

I began a research project to develop a robot that could be controlled wirelessly through bluetooth.

I applied for and recieved a $700 and $1,800 grant from the CU Engineering Excellence Fund

I Created an Embedded System to communicate with the robot working with a 8052 Processor and a bluetooth module. This robot is able to show emotions and due various actions. There are sonar/heat/audio/camera/servo motor sensors.

Overall this project prepared me for my Capstone project, inspired me to start a robotics club and got me interested in DSP.

Learning Assistant for CSCI 1300

Fall 2005

After finishing CSCI 1300 Computer Science: Programming I was invited to be a Learning Assistant for the next year class, in Spring 2006. This was quite a challenge at the time, as I had not taken any other programming course.
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The course I taught followed the curriculum of Python Programming. I worked under Dr. Grunwald, my mentor.

10 hours a week, I taught students everything from "for loops" to "recursive functions". This was additionally challenging as the students who I taught needed additional assistance and had very little foundation.

Using creative methods, I taught students new concepts by providing cognitive problems and paradigm shifts. Imagine teaching a student from Africa who can barely speak english how a for loop works.

By the end the students were able to make a fully running tic-tac-toe AI and solve the Traveling Salesman Problem using a recursive program in C.

Being a TA here fortified my skills in programming and ignited my passion for teaching. I still keep the relationships I made with the students I taught in this class.

Experimenter Effect with EDA

Spring 2007

One of my favorite classes I ever took looked very thoroughly at all the research done on Psychic research. Feomm telekinetic to precognition, we analyzed the research done with thorough scientific reasoning. As a side project I ran my own Psy experiment. We tested the effects of remote staring. I constructed a galvanic skin response that could read people's physical response to stimuli (this same contraption is used in lie detector tests).

Recruiting over 100 people, including 4 PhD's, we ran our own official psychic experiment. In the end we were invited to present our results to the Society of Scientific Exploration at a conference in Utah. Below I have some of programs I developed for this research. Whether you believe in psychic phenomena or not, hopefully you can appreciate my MatLab code and Flash skills:

Flash Presentation

This presentation was used to demonstrate our results at a scientific conference. I don't know how much sense it will make without me explaining the experiment :).

Matlab Data Analysis

This Matlab file took a LARGE amount of data, and formatted with various forms of Fourier Transforms and derivatives. We were then able to analyze our results visually and numerically.

Python User Interface

This user interface made it so various doctoral physicists could run these experiments. (Which they did).