Projects

Indirect vision involves using a mirror to view and access areas of the mouth that are difficult to see directly. Indirect vision is an essential skill for dentists to avoid long-term back pain. The Indirect App is an industry-first mobile app to train indirect vision coordination created in collaboration with practicing pediatric dentist Dr. Zachary Mills. We created the Indirect App to improve how students practice indirect vision. Our app is low cost, allows students to practice anywhere, and provides a gamified experience that is highly motivational. The app is deployed to the Android & iOS stores to reach an addressable audience of 18,000+ dental/dental hygienist students.

As my grandfather’s vision declined, he lost the ability to do things that were important to him. This included managing the retirement funds that he and Grandma depended on for income. In 2016, we found that the existing tools for text-to-speech and text enhancement were difficult to use due to the varied formats used to communicate stock information. In response, I worked closely with Grandpa to create tools that allow low-vision users to monitor their portfolios.

Computational performance is becoming increasingly critical to scientific discoveries in areas such as deep learning, weather prediction, drug discovery, and astronomical modeling. Currently, to achieve maximum performance, software must be specialized to match the characteristics of the device that it is running on. Automatic performance tuning is effective, but it does not scale well in environments with many different devices, as is the case for many volunteer computing projects. In this project, we researched ways to generate code for Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines whose performance is portable across environments. Deploying such performance portable code could accelerate discovery in fields such as medicine, biology, and astronomy.