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Daniel G

- Research Program Mentor

MSE at University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)

Expertise

Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, Analytics, Electroencephalography (neuroscience)

Bio

Hi! I'm Dan, and I'm currently finishing my Master's Degree in Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm interested in a wide array of applications of machine learning and data engineering, such as image classification and natural language processing. I'm a big proponent of using research as a means to teach yourself new skills, and if you have a cool idea I'd be happy to review what skills you might need and how to go about learning them. I'm also quite into neuroscience (my expertise is in electroencephalography) and have dabbled in some amateur game development, so the rare few of you that might have data-centric projects in those fields might be a particularly great fit. That being said, I am really looking to mentor anyone who wants to learn more about data regardless of context. I look forward to meeting you!

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.

Sentiment Analysis

Ah, words. Aren't they great? We live in an age where people can write about nearly anything they want, and in doing so express their opinions more freely than ever before. Turns out, a lot of businesses are actually quite interested in those opinions! The problem, of course, lies in the fact that reading individual written reviews is not exactly scalable (try reading 100,000 reviews and tell me otherwise). Turns out, we might be able to get computers to read for us! Or at least, extract insights deeper than "this review has the word 'good' in it." In this project, you will use machine learning to predict whether a review of something (in the domain of your choice) is positive or negative. In doing so, you'll learn about the tricky world of natural language processing and how to overcome some basic problems involving deciphering language. If you are particularly ambitious, we can even cover a bit of deep learning (neural networks). This project will likely utilize mainly Python and its associated data libraries (pandas, matplotlib, sklearn, etc.)

Combining datasets to extract insights

Data comes in many different places, and is often most powerful when combined together. This project is simple and open-ended. Find two or more datasets regarding some topic of your choice that you think might add additional insight when taken together. Your goal will be to join those datasets together and find out something cool! Depending on your ambition/comfort with Javascript, HTML, and CSS, you can even try creating a basic dashboard that allows other people to find out information about your topic. For instance, I once created a dashboard that combined housing data from Zillow with US Census data and a dataset of business information from Yelp to create an app that would help prospective movers find areas that fit their culture on a certain budget. This project will likely make heavy use of SQL, as well as Python for preprocessing.

Coding skills

I'd feel comfortable teaching Python and SQL, though am familiar with others like R, MongoDB, etc.

Teaching experience

I served as an undergraduate teaching assistant for a biopsychology course at The College of New Jersey, and currently serve as a graduate-level teaching assistant for Applied Machine Learning at The University of Pennsylvania. I also was a lecturer at HCD's "Neuro U," where I lectured on responsible use of electroencephalography in market research.

Credentials

Work experience

University of Pennsylvania (2021 - Current)
Teaching Assistant
HCD Research (2017 - 2018)
Head of Electroencephalography
The College of New Jersey- MISC Lab (2014 - 2017)
Lab Manager
The College of New Jersey- ERP Lab (2016 - 2017)
Senior Researcher

Education

The College of New Jersey
BA Bachelor of Arts (2017)
Psychology (concentrating on neuroscience and cognitive psychology), Interactive Multimedia (with a focus on game development)
University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)
MSE Master of Science in Engineering (2022)
Data Science

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