Cybersecurity

The numerous data breaches of the past few years have made evident that the battlefield of the future will be a digital one, and cybersecurity experts will be the front lines of defense. As a result, I am currently completing a minor in cybersecurity, which includes classes on cryptography, forensic science, and law and policy in cybersecurity. I also completed an eight month internship at the cybersecurity company Haystax, where I worked with a team of developers to help develop insider threat detection technology using Bayesian networks and artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence

From the rise of artificial intelligence models like Chat GPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney, it is clear that AI will play a massive role in the future of computing. As a result, I've taken multiple classes focused on this subject, where I've learned about heuristic algorithms such as A*, gradient descent, and how to construct neural networks.

Game Development

I've always had an appreciation for the creativity and problem solving that goes into game design. As a bit of a gamer myself, it is wonderful when you play a game and can see just how much love and care the programmer's put into every tiny little detail, and you can really tell how much passion they have for their work. Knowing that I can use my coding skills to channel both my creative and analytical sides into my work is extremely appealing to me -- so for the last few years I've been learning to program in C with Unity, studying computer graphics, and participating in Game Jams with the Texas Aggie Game Developers club.

Ethics

As computer scientists, we are in a position where even our everyday work can have a dramatic influence on the world around us, so it is essential to understand the moral and ethical implications of our programs, especially when working in such vital fields as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. In the past years I've studied experiments such as the MIT Moral Machine and the dangers of discrimination when implementing AI -- such as when AI was used in Amazon hiring processes and ignored female applicants, or when it was used in banks to decide loan eligibility and disproportionately denied black applicants -- all of which have made me extremely congizant of the importance of verifying your AI is nondiscriminatory and trained off of unbiased data sets. With courses such as Law and Policy in Cybersecurity I am delving even deeper into this field of study by analyzing not only what legislation is currently in place but what legislation should be enacted surrounding cybersecurity and AI.