I am a student studying computer science at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
I'm a Senior in the Computer Science department at UH Hilo. I first came to Hawaii in search of a fresh start back in December of 2007. I didn't really know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but I did know I needed a way to make a living. I took a job with a large ornamental plant farm. It was hard work, and the pay was just barely enough to get by. Yet, in spite of all of this, riding around on a tractor all day gave me a great deal of time to think. And as I thought, I realized that I wanted to go back to school.
I enrolled at Hawaii Community College in its Information Technology program back in the Spring of 2009. Going back to school breathed new ambition and new life into my soul, and so I decided to leave the farm and eventually took a job with Upward Bound, a college prep for low income and first generation high schoolers, as a tech instructor for their Summer Academy. They were pleased with the way I interacted with the students, and with my knowledge of computers, and ultimately offered me a position as their IT Specialist.
I graduated from the IT Program in the Spring of 2011 at the top of my class. From there, I made the decision to transfer to UH Hilo's Computer Science Program. The CS Program has taught me a love for programming and problem solving that I never knew I had. I became extremely interested in AI, Machine Learning, Image Processing, and Datamining, and have been supplementing the education I've received with free online courses from Coursera and Udacity. I am also an active member of ACM, and have particpiated in two Intercollegiate Programming Competitions, as well as the NYU Poly Cyber Security Awareness Week Capture the Flag, Google Codejam, and IBM's Master the Mainframe.
My studies keep me very busy, but I do manage to get some downtime in where I like to hit the beach, go diving with my father, play video games, or practice jujitsu. As my education comes to a close, it is unclear if I will be able to remain in this amazing place that has changed my life so much, but winning this competition would certainly be a step in the right direction.
As I mentioned above, my main interests fall along the lines of AI, Image Processing, Machine Learning, and Datamining, so I definitely plan to use my knowledge from at least one of these domains. I may take a whack at the real time communication theme, but being an educator myself, I may go in the direction of creating an interactive activity for first time software developers. API wise, I see a lot of interesting API's on Mashape, and API Tools, so plan on seeing API's from at least one of these sites. Moreover, I'll probably use QUANDL if I find that I need a large dataset unless I find a suitable dataset elsewhere.