Mina A
- Research Program Mentor

PhD candidate at University of Central Florida

Expertise

Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Statistics

Bio

Hi! I’m Mina, a PhD student in Big Data Analytics at UCF. I actually began my career as a designer, but after teaching myself programming, I discovered how much I enjoy data analytics and machine learning. That pushed me to fully switch careers in 2021, and I’ve been loving the journey ever since. I enjoy working on projects that involve real-world data, modeling, and thoughtful problem-solving. There’s always something new to learn in this field, and it never gets boring. Outside of work, I love spending time in nature.

Project ideas

Project ideas are meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

How Do LLMs Compare to Classical Machine Learning?

Students explore how different machine learning methods classify text by comparing classical models (TF–IDF + Logistic Regression / Random Forest) with a large language model such as DistilBERT. Using publicly available Amazon review data, the student learns how to clean text, extract features, train models, and compare their performance. They also visualize how models “see” the data using clustering or dimension reduction like PCA or t-SNE.

Coding skills

python, R

Languages I know

Farsi

Teaching experience

I was a graduate TA for the Statistical Methods course, where I assisted students with fundamentals such as descriptive statistics, sampling distributions, probability, and hypothesis testing. I also mentored junior designers in my previous role for about six months after they were hired.

Credentials

Work experience

Worth AI (2024 - 2024)

Data Scientist Intern

University of Central Florida (2023 - 2023)

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Tri-State Office Furniture Inc. (2018 - 2022)

Interior Designer

Education

Sharif University of Technology

BS Bachelor of Science (2015)

Aerospace Engineering

University of Central Florida

MS Master of Science (2025)

Statistics and Data Science