Research Experience
During my undergrad in the rigorous Applied Mathematics program at Brigham Young University (it has a bit of a reputation within the math department for being so life-absorbing and time-consuming), when I wasn't caught up in studying, hours-long homework sessions, coding labs, grading papers, tutoring, or any other personal life activities, I was trying to squeeze in research hours to help me gain experience for my future and to grow as a researcher. This page highlights some of the research I was privileged to contribute to amidst everything else going on during my undergrad.
01
Four Color Problem
This was my favorite research project to be involved in during my undergrad. It was my first exposure to Graph Theory, and I learned many practical methods for graph coloring and all about chromatic polynomials. I learned about the famous Four Color Problem in graph theory and how our research could potentially lead to another proof of the four color theorem.
I also gained some skills using Mathematica, writing papers in LaTeX, and presenting results at the student research conference. My main contribution to this research, aside from many brainstorming sessions to discuss ways to generalize our findings, was to implement the theorems we had into code in order to compute the coloring number for real world cartographic maps.
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Our paper was published in Resonance – Journal of Science Education, Volume 26, Issue 7
02
Task-dependent Optimal Weight Combinations for Static Embeddings
Towards the end of my undergrad, after venturing more into computational linguistics and machine learning, exploring more outside of theoretical mathematics, I got involved with an NLP research lab in the computer science department, DRAGN labs. It is an impressive research lab with alumni who created AI Dungeon, a game using generative language models to craft a custom experience for each user.
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This research was done at an especially busy time of my undergrad with extremely heavy load of coursework, making it difficult for me to continue involvement throughout the duration of my undergrad.
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My contribution was to write Bash scripts for the supercomputer to run experiments on language tasks using the various weight-combinations for word embedding models. After curating results from these tests, I helped analyze the results and helped produce tables in the LaTeX paper that was eventually revised into the published version.
