Computing

Several miscellaneous projects I’ve worked on include:

• Writing an AWS EC2 tutorial that discusses how to run code on an EC2 (P2) instance from start to finish.

• Implementing the cubic and adaptive cubic regularization algorithms of Nesterov and Polyak (2006) and Cartis et al. (2011)
  [code] [report]
  These unconstrained optimization algorithms are guaranteed to converge to either a local minimum or a degenerate saddle point, assuming the objective function satisfies certain regularity conditions. To my knowledge, my code was the first publicly available implementation of them.

• Creating a framework that, given output from a relatively simple SQL query and the table in the database from which it came, can discover a query that will produce this output. It does this intelligently, so that the number of necessary guesses is much fewer than a brute-force approach.
  This could be potentially useful if, e.g., you have the data you used to create a figure and need to update the figure, but don’t know where the data came from within your database.
• Contributing to the creation of a lab book for students in an introductory statistics course to learn R alongside the course material.

• Visualizing the trends in the type and frequency of financial crises across time and by geographic location by creating a motion chart.
  [motion chart][code]
  Often crises spread from one country to another, and the visualization I created gives a sense of this.