Advice from an internationally recognized hacker — Hackathons can seem intimidating for both newcomers to the tech scene and experienced programmers who are new to the hackathon community. Will I be able to keep up? What if I don’t know how to code? What if I don’t have a team? …

An epic beachfront battle featuring NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX, Boeing, and more! — This summer, I had the amazing opportunity to intern at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Every workday, I would ride a bus from Caltech to the JPL campus before walking to building 301, Project Formulation. I would spend most of my day there, in my office in…

All about computer science classes, research opportunities, clubs, and the social scene at UW — Hey there! I’m Catherine, a Computer Science major at the University of Washington. I just finished my first year at the university, and I thought it would be helpful to document and share my experience! …

A rundown on gradient boosting machines, ensemble learning, and neural networks — Kaggle is a popular platform for data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts to test their skills by competing in data science competitions. These competitions are a great way to learn and improve machine learning techniques, as well as showcase your expertise. However, with so many algorithms to choose from, it…

“School” is one of the most common words in my “fear” vocabulary — Discord is easily my most-used messaging app, and it’s no different for my friends. Whether it’s creating small group chats for studying or larger “servers” for clubs or events, it’s the perfect platform for all our communication needs. In this article, I’m excited to show you how I analyzed my…

What makes ChatGPT and other NLP ventures so impressive — Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with understanding or generating human language. NLP has a wide range of real-world applications, such as virtual assistants, text summarization, sentiment analysis, and language translation. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve likely heard of one such NLP…

Sound as a surprisingly silent killer? — In my college physics class, one of the many topics that we covered was resonant frequencies. According to my notes, resonant frequencies occur when an object vibrates at its preferred or natural frequency, maximizing the strength or amplitude of its vibration. Consider a child on a moving playground swing. If…

My data science journey + building a dataset from scratch — Entering the world of data science Kode with Klossy Early this summer, I was offered a scholarship to attend a virtual camp by Kode with Klossy. Kode with Klossy, abbreviated as KWK, is a 501(c)(3) organization for girls and non-binary students who are interested in computer science. KWK offers three different curricula for scholarship students: web development, mobile app…

One instrument in an interstellar orchestra — When you hear the word “wave,” what do you think of? Maybe you think of water waves in the ocean, or if you’re more mathematically inclined, you might think of a sinusoidal graph. In physics, a wave is defined as a disturbance in space and time. Water waves fit this…