Research Assistant: An Analysis of Hackage

Peter Michael Osera, Michael O’Connor, Doan Nhat-Hong, Sam Larson

During this research, we first design a plugin in Haskell that would run over Hackage, an open-source archive of libraries and programs for the Haskell language, collected the type and frequency information of the expressions used in the program. From that, we developed a terminal based UI in Python that would provide type information given a provided type that needed to be filled in a program and create program synthesis. After completing this research, I presented it at various department community presentation as well as at IINSPIRE LSAMP conference.

Rootstalk Digital Magazine

During my time in Grinnell my role in Vivero consisted of working with the magazine Rootstalk magazine, where I worked with Mark McFate, a Digital Library Applications Developer where we designed several different improvements for the digital web-based maagzine. In my first major contribution to the magazine, where I helped manually port print articles and issues onto the website while I learned about their hugo based static website intrastrcuture. Secondly, I designed a submission portal using html, CSS, and Javascript. Thirdly, I worked on a python pipeline, using the mammoth library which would allow for a faster turnaround rate for publication and elimate a lot of the manual work, I did in the past. Finally, using my backgorund in Computer Vision, I designed an app that would enhance some of the grainy and low quality images on the website into better quality images and well an including many quality of life features for image processing as a whole.

Research Assistant: An Exploration and Analysis of Undergraduate Type-Based Reasoning

Peter Michael Osera, Michael O’Connor, Doan Nhat-Hong

During this reseach, I explored how undergraduate students rationalized about types with various and different computer science and mathematics background with a goal of how to potentially adjust the CS such that Grinnell Students can have strong typed based reasoning. In our reasearch, we assessed 21 different students’ ability to reason about types through written examples and verbal interview questions to confirm their understanding of types. The findings of our preliminary research suggested that there was no connection between the amount of computer science and mathematics courses taken and type-reasoning ability as some advanced students did not reason about types well and vise versa. In future research, we would want to broader participant pool and enhanced experimental design could contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of programming types among students.

CASA Study Abroad Program

During this program, I studied abroad in Granada, Spain for half a semester, where I toured the different regions of Andalusia, improving my Spanish, and learning more about the culture. During my program here, I enrolled into the Centro de Lenguas Modernas, where I studied Spanish History, Literature, Sign Language and the Language itself. In addition to these class, I interned with a Professor and Graduating Senior where we developed a mental health chatbot. My role was to help maintain and manage the training data for chatbot, aid with translations of this data from Spanish to English and English to Spanish. This exeperience overall helped me gain a new perspective on computer science, in both a siginificantly larger college and in a foriegn country.