Undergraduate Researcher · Albany, New York
Half of what I do is research and half is building. Both halves are about making the machine useful to the person actually sitting in front of it.
Research
Two parallel studies with Professor Amreeta Chatterjee at the University at Albany. One reads what students write about AI on their own time. The other measures what happens inside a team that is using it together.
I mined four student subreddits, classified the posts with a locally hosted Llama 3, then modeled the topics with BERTopic and bge-m3 embeddings. The context window holds 8,192 tokens, so a long post stays in one piece instead of getting chopped into fragments.
Survey design and quantitative analysis on how the design of an AI tool reshapes who does what inside a team. Likert composites read against thematic coding, looking for cognitive offloading and for what happens to the zone of proximal development when the group has a model to lean on.
Designed and ran a hands-on session for beginners: live Python through a full pipeline, why transformer embeddings beat bag-of-words for this, UMAP and HDBSCAN in practice, and privacy-compliant labeling with a locally hosted model. I wrote the curriculum from scratch.
Projects
Building is the part I would do anyway, unpaid, on a weekend. Each one started with somebody stuck: a student who cannot tell whether their schedule is even possible, an older adult holding the wrong pill at two in the morning. Eight so far, all still running.
It models a university curriculum as a directed acyclic graph, and Kahn’s algorithm finds impossible prerequisite loops in O(V+E). Tested across 15 courses and 17 dependency rules.
A journaling app where writing activity grows a living SVG tree. A scoring system maps word count and consistency to visual growth stages, rendered in real time.
Custom Bit and Word classes, a ripple-carry ALU, DRAM, a cache hierarchy, and a full fetch-decode-execute cycle. None of it uses Java’s own arithmetic.
Lexer to parser to AST to a constraint-satisfaction engine for a custom logic language. Pinning collapses a 10³² permutation space to something solvable instantly.
Contextual inquiries with older adults turned up a gap: pills get misidentified after hours, when nobody is reachable. I prototyped a scan-and-voice interface around universal design to close it.
It pulls NASA’s APOD and Mars Rover feeds, recovers from failed requests, and lets you browse backward by date. Vanilla JavaScript, no dependencies.
A terminal game engine built on struct-based state and hand-managed memory. Three boards, a randomized opponent, and a Valgrind run with nothing leaking.
A multi-page site on Yemeni history and craft. Mobile-first CSS and semantic HTML, built with core web technologies on purpose.
Experience
Built a volunteer directory portal serving 1,200+ students, then pitched it to UAlbany OCM and secured enterprise engineering support to migrate it into the official Drupal CMS. Drove WCAG 2.1 compliance across five courses.
A dual-project appointment under Professor Chatterjee: the NLP pipeline for wellbeing discourse and the quantitative study of AI-mediated collaboration, plus the BERTopic workshop.
Started it from nothing and had it officially recognized within one semester. I wrote the constitution and recruited a 15-person executive board.
First point of contact for 100+ inquiries a week across financial aid and billing. Held 92%+ satisfaction while cutting resolution time 15% through peak season.
Record
After Hours
Four frames from the last year, in the order I took them. Phone camera, long exposures, nothing re-graded for this page. The second one is the night in November the aurora came far enough south to show up over Albany, which is not something I expect to see again soon.
The first one cost me ten seconds of not moving. The rest I got on the walk home.
Contact
Research collaborations, PhD conversations, internships, or an argument about whether topic models actually understand anything.
ahmed.almashraie@gmail.com