Technical Work
I started programming on Scratch when I was eight.2014–2018. These days most of my programming involves data: at Russell Research, and in a tool for practicing music that I keep coming back to.
Russell ResearchSummer 2024, Summer 2025
East Rutherford, NJ
Russell Research is a market research firm, and I’ve spent two summers there. In 2024, as a machine learning intern, I trained models from scratch in Python and PyTorch to identify characteristics of survey questions. I compared convolutional and recurrent networks and explored graph-based approaches. Part of the job was investigating duplicate survey questions, so that near-copies of the same question couldn’t end up in both the training and validation data. At handoff, I explained the models’ results and their limitations.
In 2025 I switched to data engineering, contributing to a C#/.NET pipeline that standardizes market research surveys across XML, JSON, and Word documents.
Music practice tool
This started when a friend was learning the first movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto and asked me for feedback. I made a small tool that lined up their playing with recordings by professional pianists and let me move through the audio in fine steps, so I could attach a note to any moment.
Separately, making score videos had me thinking about syncing audio to a score. Putting the two ideas together, the tool now shows the score. After approximately syncing audio by selecting a few important points to align, you can click on a bar of music and it plays the audio from there. Then, you can switch between pianists’ recordings without losing your place.So far I’ve set it up with Bach’s French Overture and Schubert’s Sonata in C Minor, D. 958, which I’m learning now. Next I want it to work well with my own recordings as input, and I’m still figuring out the best way to do that.
It’s a long-term project, and it keeps changing as my idea of it does. I don’t yet fully understand how to align multiple versions of a piece automatically, which is part of why I’m taking a tutorial on harmonic analysis this semester.