1. Dallas Brittany Kidd
English Major, Magna Cum Laude, 2008
Psychology Major, Summa Cum Laude, 2011
High School Special Ed Math Teacher
English as a Second Language Teacher
Masters in Computer Science, 2015
Computer Scientist
_________________+

2. Unity and Autodesk Maya:
Game Development
Meet Mr. Scientist,
the first character I modeled
in Autodesk Maya.
I made this game during
spring break using Autodesk Maya
and Unity. For the ImagineCup
competition, I created a
preview video using Camtasia.

3. Unreal Development Kit:
NSM-IT Model
When I worked at NSM-IT at UH, I designed the new office location
using blueprints for scale, modeling new objects in Autodesk Maya, and
placing them with the correct lighting in UDK. I worked under a
professor and also incorporated some of his 3D objects, like the
computer monitors, posters, and printers. But I designed most of
what you see, like the walls, barstools, and floor, to provided
specifications.

4. Poetry Generator:
An Artificial Intelligence Project
Windows 8 app
For an independent project, I programmed a poetry generator in C++
using a small dictionary and 2 poem algorithms.
Later, I converted it to JavaScript for a Windows 8 app, and I
used PhoneGap to have it work on Android.
(Search Amaryllis on the Windows 8 app store to downbload it for free.)
Dictionary size: 47 words
earth: intense, protective.
inspiring.
Dictionary size: 169 words
wish
the atypical lightning, trusting and unraveled
wish
hoping, hoping, hoping

5. Raspberry Pi
Operating Systems
(Raspberry Pi images from raspberrypi.org)
Six Operating Systems:
• Raspbian (Debian Wheezy)
• Arch Linux (lightweight Linux)
• Pidora (Fedora Remix)
• RISC OS (non-Linux)
• OPENELEC (XBMC Media Centre)
• RASPBMC (XBMC Media Centre)
One of the experiments...
After installing and configuring the operating systems
on SanDisk Extreme 8 GB SDHC Class 10 cards, I did a
simple C++ floating point comparison between Raspbian,
Pidora, and Arch Linux.
1st Place: Raspbian, 441,860,000 tics
2nd Place: Pidora, 424,460,000 tics
3rd Place: Arch, 437,220,000 tics
(Although they were all blown away by Linux Mint on my laptop
with an i7 processor and 12 GB RAM, which was ~30 times faster.)
Processor:
700Mhz ARM11
Weight:
45 g
Dimensions:
85.60mm x 56mm x 21mm
Base Price:
About $35

6. _________________
4,375 Windows 8 App Downloads
2,265 Windows Phone App Downloads
6,640 Total App Downloads
For 6 Cross-Platform Apps
+
Windows 8
App Development
I used Visual Studio 2012 with C#,
XML, HTML, and XPlatformCloudKit
GitHub code for some apps and
Visual Studio 2013, JavaScript,
HTML, and CSS for the rest.
Developer Name: Amaryllis

7. Digital Image Processing from scratch
using MATLAB without the Image Processing Toolbox
the original images
my code generated these binary images
and here my code
color-coded
unique “blobs”
and identified
their centroids
(an individual project)

8. Digital Image Processing using MATLAB
and the Image Processing Toolbox
If you take a leaf image
and binarize it
and locate its boundary…
…then the signature of the leaf
can be compared to average signatures
of leaf classes in order to classify it
individual signature class average signature
This was a group project. We
successfully classified 90% of
the leaves of this class, and we
had 11 total classes of leaves.

9. Neural Network Approaches to
Natural Language Processing
Models Performance Experiment
Tiny
Full
Partial
Emails
Models Used for Experiment
Tiny: 96.3 MB various text
Emails: 1.32 GB Enron emails
Partial: 680 MB Wikipedia text
Full: 17.6 GB Wikipedia text
For this independent project,
I used Gensim, a free and
open-source machine learning
Python library for topic modeling
and semantics. In Gensim is
word2vec, which was originally
created by Google in C but has
been ported to Python and uses
Cython for speed.
In my experiment, the Full model
was the English Wikipedia dump
(yes, the entire thing), but it did
not perform much better than the
smaller files, surprisingly.

10. Analysis of 2008 U.S. flight data using
Hadoop MapReduce: a big data analytics project
The average percent
of flights delayed by
airport is over 40%!
Although,
admittedly, even 1
minute counted as a
delay here...
Boxplot for Percent of Delayed Flights by Origin Airport
An outlier: This
airport had a
very tiny
number of
flights, and
they were all
delayed.
IAH and HOU airports both had the same percentage of delays
(47%), even though IAH had 185,172 flights in 2008, which also included
international flights, and HOU only had 55,933 flights, which were all domestic.
Percentage
Did you know?
This was an individual
project, and the
dataset was provided.

11. HackRice:
A Weekend-Long Hackathon
• Teamed up with a friend for HackRice for the first time that
Rice University opened up its hackathon to other schools
• Won a prize from Microsoft for our app, which we created in less
than 24 hours
• The app gives the members of CSGirls updated information about
meetings and resources from our workshops, such as our resume
workshops, and it works both on Windows 8 and Windows Phone

12. - Added 10 pages to the
Confluence site for
documentation and idea
discussion
- Designed an infographic to
summarize alarm management
history, created an alarm
icon for an app, chose
which pre-made icons would
be used in the apps, and
recorded videos of the apps
in use
Internship at the startup company
Medical Informatics Corp
- Created a virtual hospital
script to generate 13 tables
of data for testing and
demonstration purposes
- Submitted 40 bugs in
Tietronix, the bug-tracking
system, and helped fix 28
recorded bugs
- Set up and maintained the 2
Rackspace servers so that we
could demonstrate our apps
live for potential customers
I got to do a little of everything while working at MIC... Python, NodeJS,
JavaScript, JSON, postgreSQL, HTML, CSS, Inkscape, Camtasia

13. Volunteering at
Camp BitSmart
Topics:
- Hello World in multiple languages
- Introduction to binary and ASCII
- 3D printing and its applications
- Wearable electronics (and fashion!)
- Raspberry Pi
- Game design
Main Activity:
- Design and present your own idea
to get a prize
Q: How do you get young girls interested in coding?
A: You make it fun! 24 girls, ages 7-11
2 hours
2 volunteer computer science teachers

14. CSGirls:
Computer Science Girls Club
President from 2014-2015, VP from 2013-2014
• Organization founded in 2013
• Helped organize and run computer science events,
including workshops, guest speakers, community outreach
activities, get-togethers, and more
• Helped organize the first UH CodeRED hackathon
Creativity ▪ Community ▪ Collaboration ▪ Confidence

15. Master’s Thesis Research
Using Astronomy Data
“Using Machine Learning for Automatic Clasification of Classical Cepheids”
- Developed new features for classifying stars automatically
- Used the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) data for
Classical Cepheid variable stars in the LMC & SMC galaxies
Fundamental-Mode
Cepheids
usually have
asymmetrical
light curves
(but not
always!)
First-Overtone
Cepheids
almost always
have
symmetrical
light curves
Second-Overtone
Cepheids
have much
smaller
amplitudes and
very
symmetrical
light curves
Automatic methods are becoming
crucial to the astronomy field
because data collection is
growing so rapidly