I currently work at The MITRE Corporation, a place that has given me the opportunity to develop an immense number of skills and backgrounds. MITRE is the opperator of several FFRDCs (Federally Funded Research & Development Centers), of which includes the NSEC (National Security Engineering Center) - which is where I work. Within the NSEC, my work pertains to a specific DoD (Department of Defense) sponsor within a Lab called the Cross Cutting Urgent Innovation Lab. Our goal is basically to rapidly address crucial DoD needs through an iteration of analysis and prototyping.
At CUIC, I am part of a small team that focuses on leveraging a mix of technoligies to allow warfighters and military operators to make better, data-driven decisions. The bulk of these technologies include computer vision, geospatial data processing, machine learning, high performance computing, and statistics. Although I cannot go into the details of the projects that I have worked on (for security classification purposes) I can tell you that throughout my time at MITRE I have worked deeply on each of those fields to solve complex mission problems. On the computer vision and image processing side I have implemented numerous C++ algorithms for image and vector data processing, constructed CNN training/inference pipelines, designed & implemented an image preprocessing routine using the CUDA framework to run on Nvidia GPUs, and much more. On the probability & statistics side, I have implemented a Monte Carlo algorithms for estimation of some distribution of interest, created a complex framework for Kernel Density estimates given multiple spatio-temporal datasets, and implemented a statistically proven anomaly detection algorithm.
In the first year of my employment at MITRE, my project team received a Program Recognition Award at the company. As a company of over 8,000 professionals, this was quite a big deal! It was not only great accomplishment for the team, but also goes to show the kind of talent I got to work with.
In the summer of 2018, I was given the great opportunity to intern at IBM Watson in Denver, CO with a team who worked on the Natural Language Understanding API. This opportunity gave me great exposure to agile and scrum development, while learning about new production technologies like Kubernetes and Docker. As a DevOps intern, my task was to build a deployment pipeline that could handle automated deployments. To accomplish this, I started by creating a robust deployment vertification test suite written in NodeJS using testing frameworks like Mocha and Chai. I then set up the deployment pipeline using Jenkins and other internal IBM tools. This freed up considerable time for the team of developers who had to roll out new deployments many times a weeks to ensure nea features, bug fixes, and new expanding data centers were reached out to customers as soon as possible. By automating this process, I feel like I saved the team a great deal of time while also ensuring that the software API functions as expected, with over 400 end to end tests, unit tests, correctness tests, completion tests, and more. I also made a seperate test suite to ensure the stability of all machine learning models on the network. Through this project I learned a great deal in terms of new technologies, working in teams, and learning new things on the go.
I also created a mini Node.js application to learn more about the team's API which can be found on GitHub. The project basically allows you to easily extract current Twitter data related to a user-specified keyword and run concepts, keywords, and sentiment analysis using the IBM Watson Natural Language API.
I've spent the summers of 2016 and 2017 interning at The Port Authority of NY & NJ in NYC learning the ins and outs of professional engineering. In the summer of 2016, I worked with the PATH train construction team, helping with major projects which included the update and replacement of the Christopher St. Substation, which powers the PATH train route going to 33rd St. This was a very rewarding experience, as I worked with many experienced engineers on complex development projects that required a lot of teamwork and coordination. The summer of 2017, I spent at the PA Bus Terminal in Manhattan, NY in the construction management office. The bulk of the work I did included reviewing submittals, which consisted of parts and equipment specifications given by contractors, creating labor and material estimates, and inspecting contractor work and making sure it aligns with meets contract specifications. These experiences have greatly boosted my confidence about working in the industry, and provided me with invaluable learning experiences with working in teams, meeting deadlines, and networking.
