Winter 2019-2020 - Research Proposal

The research proposal application process was selective. The following summarizes the intentions behind my research:

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The objective is to explore a concept in computer science and re-explain it in a work of fiction so that the concept is easy for anyone outside the field to understand. Specifically, I will explore the basic communication problems in parallel computing. Using general ideas of computer science, I will create metaphors of the parallel computing challenges and represent them as the world of smart technology. In this way the story will present a world that represents current problems computer scientists are trying to solve for complex tasks.

This is an interdisciplinary project. I plan to bridge the world of computer science and everyday life to predict how smart technology will impact society in five years. The goal is to communicate advanced concepts by providing concrete metaphors for how computer science works. I will also explore ethical problems and dilemmas introduced by smart technology. Readers will not need a computer science background to understand these concepts; ideally they will not even realize that they are learning computer science. The intended audience is middle schoolers and high schoolers who might not be considering computer science as a future career path. This story will draw its readers into the field.

Spring 2020 - Researching Ada Lovelace

Ada Byron aged seventeen (1832)

By Unknown author - Scanned from The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron by Joan Baum.
Originally from the Lovelace-Byron Collection., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19076813

The historical figure, Augusta Ada (née Byron) King, Countess of Lovelace, inspired the fictional character, ADA, in the boutique. Before writing The von Neumann Boutique, I investigated several recorded events in Lovelace's life, including Lovelace's attempted elopement with her tutor, William Turner, between 1832-1833. My research was further advanced with the assistance of librarians from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. They provided electronic access to diary entries located in the Lovelace Byron Dep.

Summer 2020 - The von Neumann Boutique

As a Monroe scholar at William & Mary, I received a research grant to devote 7-10 weeks of my summer to research. During this time, I studied parallel processing, drew connections to real-life events, and wrote a story interweaving them. At the end of the summer, I published my manuscript.

Topics in computer science:

• Black box model
• Serial computations
• Bottleneck issue
• Embarrassingly parallel computations
• von Neumann architecture (memory, CPU/processor, input/output)
• Multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) parallel processing architecture
• Interconnecting network
• Data exchange topology
• Fault tolerance
• Fault resistance
• Redundancy
• etc.

Winter 2020-2021

Ingredients for This Website: A Few Elements I Learned to Use

The objective was to build this website completely from scratch in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I wanted to test how sophisticated my website would be after a few weeks without using Bootstrap or other libraries for templates. Since this is the first time I've coded in HTML/CSS, I relied on blogs and tutorials, such as w3schools.com and tutorialspoint.com, to learn how to use the elements and how to structure my documents. The elements I used include the following: