About Me
Hello, everyone! My name is Angela, and I have had a fascinating journey from being a music teacher to pursuing a career in computer science.
With an undergraduate degree in Music Education from the University of Illinois, Masters of Education Leadership from Indiana University, a certificate in Data Science and Business Analytics from the University of Texas at Austin, a graduate certificate from iCAN, and plans to start my Masters in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in the fall and graduate in the spring of 2024, it is fair to say I am a perpetual student who is fascinated with learning, passionate about collaborating, and excited about my future in computer science.
I am honored to be a participant in the 2023 DREAM cohort. The Distributed REsearch Apprenticeships for Master’s, DREAM for short, is designed to provide research opportunities for people entering the computer science field after their undergraduate degree to support those entering the field with mentorship, professional development, and collaboration in pursuit of higher education.
If you have any questions or would like to collaborate, please email me at roeser2@illinois.edu.
About My Advisor
My advisor is Dr. Yael Gertner from the University of Illinois.
She earned her BS and MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and she earned her PhD from the University of Pennslyania in Computer and Information Science. Her research and contributions include the power of cryptography, specifically with primitives and Private Information Retrieval as well as language acquisition with regards to learning verbs and sentence comprehension. Dr. Gertner started teaching in the Grainger College of Engineering in the computer science department at the University of Illinois in 2020 with the iCAN program because she is committed to broadening participation in computer science.
Please find more information about Dr. Gertner on her webpage.
About My Mentor
My mentor for my project is Dr. Gabe Fierro from the Colorado School of Mines.
He earned his BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and MS and PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Dr. Fierro is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. As described on his website, Dr. Fierro’s research “focuses on the design and development of efficient, practical systems that enable sustainable practices at societal scale through making critical cyberphysical data easier to discover, manage and leverage”.
Please find more information about Dr. Fierro on his webpage.
About My Projects
I am currently working on two projects with Dr. Gertner and a few Masters students at the University of Illinois.
CS + X
“CS + X” is a topics course designed by Dr. Yael Gertner, graduate student Kathleen Isenegger, and a team of collaborators for high school students to engage with computer science and its relationship to other areas of discipline at the University of Illinois. Our unit for this summer is called “CS + Linguistics” and was created to show the connections in the two fields through topics such as Python implementation, machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. This unit will be taught to three groups of high school students: two sessions of Upward Bound and the other will be with local high school students.
TRIO Upward Bound, through the University of Illinois Minority Student Affairs Division, partners with three local high schools to “provide our students with high quality academic, cultural, and career related activities designed to prepare and equip them to successfully complete high school, enroll in an accredited post-secondary institution and obtain a baccalaureate degree”. Read more about the program here.
The course includes a English sentence generator Python application that uses grammar rules to construct sentences in English with a determiner, noun phrase, and verb phrase with extensions to include prepositional phrases and more. Students will utilize parsing trees to plan their own grammar rules and decide terminal cases to ensure the accuracy of their generated phrases through functional programming. Along the way, students will read and discuss key computer science literature that examines fairness, ethical concerns, equity, and inclusion in the computer science field and community as well as in the creation and implementation of artificial intelligence applications.
Study Skills and Sense of Belonging in Computer Science
This project is to collect feedback on a course in the University of Illinois undergraduate discrete mathematics course, which due to the nature of the subject is considered to be more conceptual and theoretical compared to other applied computer science courses in the major curriculum. Through the recorded interviews of students, and midterm and final survey responses, Dr. Gertner, graduate student Deb Ghosh, and team are seeking to collect feedback on succesful study skills and resources the students utilized to provide guidance to future students. In addition, we hope to analyze the impact of this discrete mathematics course on the undergraduate’s sense of belonging in computer science, and we are looking to discover the relationship between a student’s study habits, their utilized resources, and their perception of the course, their performance, and their sense of belonging.