| Sami Benzaid
Carleton College Senior Computer Science Major benzaids <AT> carleton <DOT> edu |
About Me:
- I'm currently an undergraduate computer science major at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. I just finished applying to graduate schools, and I hope that while I'm there I'll be able to narrow down my interests a little bit to a field that I really enjoy doing research in, as my list of interests is very large right now. The list includes such areas as Computer Architecture, Database Systems, Computer Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction, and Networks, as well as others.
CV/Resumé:
Research:
- I am currently working on my senior comprehensive project, which is a group project with five students, all of whom are computer science majors as well. The goal for the project is to write a software application to make support vector machines (SVMs) quantitatively and visually more intuitive to a wider range of people. Our project advisor is Professor David Musicant. We intend to submit a paper about our findings to a conference in March 2008.
- Summer 2007: I joined an already ongoing data mining research project. It is an interdisciplinary project, with computer scientists, chemists, and atmospheric scientists. The primary goal of the project during the summer months was to use data from an Aerosol Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometer (ATOFMS) to accurately predict the amount of environmental carbon (EC) in the atmosphere. I am still working on this project during the school year. Our research advisor is Professor David Musicant.
- Summer 2006: I was a research assistant for two months on a data mining project led by Professor Amy Csizmar Dalal. The goal of the project was to accurately predict the user-perceived quality of streaming media based on data from user surveys. A paper, of which I am a co-author, was published from this project, and is cited in the publications section.
Publications:
- A. Csizmar Dalal, D. Musicant, J. Olson, B. McMenamy, S. Benzaid, B. Kazez, E. Bolan. "Predicting User-Perceived Quality Ratings from Streaming Media Data". In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2007), Glasgow, Scotland, June 2007.
Relevant Links:
- Carleton College - The college I currently attend.
- Carleton College Computer Science Department - The CS department website; contains info about courses, faculty, past and present comps projects, among other things.
- ENCHILADA - "Environmental Chemistry Through Intelligent Atmospheric Data Analysis". This is a program that helps visualize and perform several different operations on ATOFMS (Aerosol Time-Of-Flight Mass Spectrometer) data. Part of what I did during the Summer of 2007 was work on parts of this software.
- EDAM ENCHILADA at SourceForge - This is the SourceForge page for the EDAM Enchilada project, where the source code can be obtained for those who are interested. (In case you haven't had enough acronyms, EDAM stands for Exploratory Data Analysis and Management).
- Randy Pausch's Last Lecture - Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. This is a talk he gave at CMU entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". My parents found this video and recommended it to me, and I listed it here because I believe it conveys a very positive message relevant to anyone (it isn't just for people in computer science).
Recreational Interests:
- I enjoy playing video games (primarily on consoles rather than on a computer, but I do have a few favorite computer games). Nintendo is my favorite console and game company, as I have been playing their games since I was six years old (and yes, I did get a Wii at launch, AND I didn't have to wait in line ^_^). I enjoy their classics, like Mario games and Zelda games, among many others. However, in recent years, a lot of unique games have come to their systems that have really grown on me, such as the extremely well-written and addicting lawyer game series Phoenix Wright, and the surgery puzzle game Trauma Center. Of course, I don't limit myself to Nintendo games; I enjoy role-playing games, especially anything made by Squaresoft (now Square Enix) like the Final Fantasy series, Kingdom Hearts, or Chrono Games. I also enjoy party games, and music sim games such as Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) and Guitar Hero.
- As far as my other recreational interests, my favorite books are The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the Harry Potter books. Incidentally, these also serve (with the exception of The Hobbit, although it looks like something's being done about it) as some of my favorite movies. I really enjoy movies, and am open to all different genres, although admittedly my favorite genre is comedy. Music-wise, "Weird Al" Yankovic is my favorite American singer, but I like to listen to music in French and Japanese as well. However, more than 50% of the time, I listen to the video game remix music of OCRemix, often from their stream site while I'm doing homework in the lab.
- How to kill time on the Internet:
- Slashdot - Technology news aggregator
- Reddit - News aggregator
- Digg - Another news aggregator
- xkcd - A math/science/technology-related webcomic
- Penny Arcade - A gaming webcomic
- Wellington Grey - Miscellanea - Another math/science/technology webcomic. There are some good flowcharts, too.
- Homestar Runner - Entertaining Flash comics by two very talented people.
Last updated 03/19/2008
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