Computer Science Assistant

Byron Knoll

**** ***** ****, *********, ** V*T *K9 Canada

604-***-**** *****@**********.*** http://byronknoll.com

Education

University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

M.Sc. Computer Science, 2009 to present

University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

B.Sc. Double Major: Computer Science and Cognitive Systems (Cognition and Brain Stream), 2004 to 2009

Selected Coursework:

Computer Science Software Engineering Object-Oriented Programming Models of Computation

Functional and Logic Programming Computer Hardware and Operating Systems Algorithm

Design and Analysis Arti cial Intelligence Machine Learning and Data Mining Scienti c

Computing Relational Databases Bioinformatics Convex Optimization Computational

Linguistics Computer Vision

Mathematics Calculus Matrix Algebra Linear Programming Probability Statistics

Philosophy Logic and Critical Thinking Symbolic Logic Computability, Decidability, and Recursion

Theory Decision and Game Theory Perception Philosophy of Mind

Electrical and Computer Engineering Digital Logic Design Microcomputers

Psychology Biological and Cognitive Psychology Developmental, Social, Personality, and Clinical

Psychology Cognitive Neuroscience Neurobiological Bases of Behaviour Principles of Animal

Learning Principles of Animal Behaviour

Professional Experience

Google (May 2010 to August 2010)

Software Engineer in Test Intern

Performed data mining on test/compilation data to extract useful metrics.

20% project: implemented a Gmail Labs feature.

UBC Computer Science (September 2009 to December 2009)

Teaching Assistant

Graduate teaching assistant for Computer Science 322 (Arti cial Intelligence).

UBC Michael Smith Laboratories (May 2009 to August 2009)

Junior Bioinformatician

Designed and implemented a database system for storing the relationships between laboratories, activities,

experiments, and samples.

Compared di erent tools and algorithms for expressed sequence tag assembly. Designed a new algorithm to

cluster large amounts of data and perform sequence assembly in parallel. Applied the algorithm to assemble

the mountain pine beetle genome and sandalwood genome.

UBC Computer Science (September 2008 to December 2008)

Teaching Assistant

Undergraduate teaching assistant for Computer Science 121 (Models of Computation).

Microsoft (May 2008 to August 2008)

Software Development Engineer Intern

Summer internship as a software developer for O ce Live Workspace (http://workspace.o ce.live.com).

Worked on two product features. One of the features (user pro le page) was successfully launched during the

internship and is live on the website.

UBC Computer Science (May 2007 to April 2008, January 2010 to April 2010)

Research Assistant

Software developer for AIspace under supervision of Alan Mackworth and David Poole. AIspace is a

collection of Java applets used to teach fundamental arti cial intelligence concepts.

Designed the AIspace website (http://aispace.org).

UBC Psychology (September 2006 to May 2007)

Lab Assistant

Provided technical support for equipment and computers in the lab.

Designed the o cial lab website (http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~cjlab).

Helped design a survey website to collect data for a study.

Performed video editing.

Competitions

Advanced to semi- nals in Marathon category of TopCoder Open 2010.

Advanced to semi- nals in Game Design category of ImagineCup 2010.

Member of Thunderbots RoboCup team. Team leader for the arti cial intelligence module. Competed in

the RoboCup 2009 small size league competition in Austria and 2010 competition in Singapore.

Member of UBC* programming team. Placed 5th at the 2008 ACM International Collegiate Paci c

Northwest Programming Contest and 15th place at the 2009 contest.

Member of KeepItSimple BattleCode team. Competed in BattleCode 2009, placing 10th place (and 2nd

place in the non-MIT category).

Competed in the Robotics and Algorithm category of ImagineCup 2009. Advanced to the world nals in

Egypt and placed 2nd (winning a $4000 prize).

Competed in the IJCAI-09 AI Video Competition. Nominated for best short award.

Competed in the Net ix Prize competition.

Competed in several TopCoder/Google Code Jam/Al Zimmermann programming contests (2007-present).

Publications

Knoll, B., Kisy ski, J., Carenini, G., Conati, C., Mackworth, A., Poole, D. 2008. AIspace: Interactive Tools

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for Learning Arti cial Intelligence. In Proceedings of the AAAI 2008 AI Education Workshop.

Academic Honors and Awards

University of British Columbia

Dean s Honor List (2004-2009)

NSERC Undergraduate Summer Research Award (summer 2007)

Trek Excellence Scholarship for Continuing Students (2006)

Science Scholar (2006)

Member of Golden Key International Honor Society (since 2006)

High School

Excellence award in Computer Science (12th grade)

National Honour Society (11th and 12th grades)

Three Certi cates of Excellence for volunteer social work (11th and 12th grades)

Two Tahr Pin hiking awards (10th and 12th grades)

Excellence award in Computers (9th grade)

Excellence award in Mathematics (9th grade)

Skills

Specialized in machine learning, arti cial intelligence, and algorithm design

Pro ciency in software development (in decreasing order of familiarity) using: Java, MATLAB, R, Perl, C#,

C, JavaScript, Prolog, C++, Python, Haskell, Assembly, Whitespace, Pascal, and QBasic

Familiarity with HTML, CSS, AJAX, SQL, PHP, L TEX, and JUnit

A

Familiarity with UNIX, GNU/Linux, and Win32

Activities

Attended ACM ICPC World Final as a guest (China, 2010)

Attended Neural Information Processing Systems conference (Vancouver, 2009)

Presented poster and demonstration about AIspace at AAAI conference (Chicago, 2008)

Presented poster about AIspace at e-Learning Open House (Vancouver, 2008)

Attended Visual Analytics conference (Vancouver, 2008)

Volunteered at Uncertainty in Arti cial Intelligence conference (Vancouver, 2007)

Attended Robotics for Society conference (Vancouver, 2007)

Yearbook committee/social committee (India, 2003/2004)

Assisted design of website for Kodaikanal International School (India, 2003)

Volunteered social service work, 90+ hours (India, 2002-2004)

Programming Projects

Program Name Team Size Programming Description

Language

Amnesia 4 Prolog Text adventure game.

Arlisy 1 C++ Neural network program.

(http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/arlisy)

Cryptomni 1 Java File encryption program using the one time pad cipher.

(http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/cryptomni)

EternityII 1 Java A solver for the Eternity II puzzle using stochastic local

search.

Fractal 1 Java The Mandelbrot set.

(http://byronknoll.com/fractal.html)

Jabberchat 4 Java Google Talk plugin for Eclipse.

Keyboard 2 Java Keyboard layout optimization program using stochastic

local search.

Marvin 4 Haskell Chatterbot using natural language processing.

Mona 1 Java Performs vectorization using stochastic local search.

Net ix Prize 1 Java Predicting user movie ratings using a neural network.

Nort 1 Java Two player game based on Tron.

(http://byronknoll.com/nort.html)

Music Library 1 Java MP3 organizing software.

Olymipicmaster 4 Java Ticket manager using a SQL database.

Padomni 1 Java Simple text editor.

Path Finder 3 C# A maze solver for tablet PCs (using A* search algorithm).

Pattern Recognition 1 Java Uses neural networks to predict temporal patterns.

(http://byronknoll.com/pattern.html)

PCA 1 Python Performs principal component analysis on a series of

images using singular value decomposition (SVD) and

projects them to a 2D display.

Ping 1 Java A simple game based on the classic game Pong.

(http://byronknoll.com/ping.html)

siarco 1 Java Arithmetic coding. (http://code.google.com/p/siarco)

Search Engine 1 Python Latent semantic indexing using SVD.

Soku 1 Java Simple game involving dodging soccer balls.

(http://byronknoll.com/soku.html)

Solar Hamster 4 C# Silverlight game made for ImagineCup 2010.

RPS 1 Java Rock, Paper, Scissors AI made using hierarchical

temporal memory. (http://byronknoll.com/ping.html)

Recognizer 1 C# Handwritten digit recognition using backpropagation

neural networks (achieves over 90% accuracy).

Swarm 1 Java A game which involves controlling a swarm of dots.

(http://byronknoll.com/swarm.html)

Tagger 1 Java Performs part-of-speech tagging using hidden Markov

models (achieves approximately 80% accuracy).

Thunderbots 3 C++ Designed and implemented the AI responsible for

controlling a team of ve robots for the RoboCup soccer

competition. Created a graphical simulator to test the AI.

Time Stop 1 C++ Time Stop is a 2D physics-based puzzle game. It uses the

Box2D physics engine and OpenGL.

(http://sourceforge.net/projects/time-stop)

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