2023-03-16: My journey to ODU WS-DL Group

 

My name is Brian Llinás, and I joined the Web Science and Digital Libraries (WS-DL) research group at Old Dominion University (ODU) as a Ph.D. student in the Spring of 2023 (my first year), supervised by Dr. Michael Nelson. Recently I received my bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering at Universidad del Norte (UniNorte), Barranquilla, Colombia.

I have been involved in research academic life for the last two years. I started working with some professors from the College of Industrial Engineering at UniNorte on research topics such as Operation Research, Humanitarian Logistics, Simulation & Transportation, and Machine Learning. Still, I developed more affinity with Machine Learning, Data Science, and everything related to statistics and data.

My significant research experience in Colombia was working with the SIMAS-UN research group at UniNorte, which is part of the Storymodelers Lab in the Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center (VMASC). SIMAS-UN has a research partnership with faculty at ODU VMASC supervised by Dr. Jose Padilla and Dr. Erika Frydenlund, where I developed computational insights about frustration toward migrants in global refugee host communities. This research experience prompted me to pursue a Ph.D. to further my studies and help me grow my data science and modeling knowledge and skillsets. 

Also, I have work experience as a Data Scientist. I worked with Fintra S.A. (financial sector) and DataLeik (consulting sector), where I extracted vast volumes of enterprise customer data from the cloud, and debugged and cleaned data to discard irrelevant information. I used data visualization and manipulation tools to perform statistical analysis. I implemented machine learning models to create prescriptive and predictive models that help the company to make more accurate decisions.

In addition, I was an undergraduate teaching assistant at UniNorte in courses such as Engineering Data Analysis I, Engineering Data Analysis II, and Integral Quality Management and Control. I have gained coding skills in R, Python, Arena, and SQL, but I am learning in HTML and PHP with the courses, and I hope to learn more during my journey. 

I have enrolled in two courses this semester:

• CS 800 Research Methods (by Dr. Stephan Olariu)

• CS 550 Database Concepts (by Dr. Jian Wu)

My research interests are, but are not limited to, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). I am currently working on regression models and plan to work on named entity recognition and large language model.

It is an honor to be part of the WS-DL and work under the direct supervision of Dr. Michael Nelson. I hope to meet the group in person and learn more about you.

Regards, 

Brian Llinás