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Work Experience
Software Engineer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT• June 2020 - August 2020
This project focused on finding ways to alter how news is perceived by each individual. I processed several videos using state-of-the-art technologies for video style-transferring. This resulted in more than 100 different styled videos, which I showcased by deploying a full-stack website using React and Flask. You can see this website by visiting https://art-news.media.mit.edu/ I also applied audio processing technology into another React App to detect different features in speech (e.g. words spoken per minute, pitch, intensity). You can find a working demo here: https://sound-recognition.vercel.app/ and the source code here: https://github.com/ralcant/sound_recognition
Undergraduate Researcher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT• February 2020 - June 2020
For this project, I analyzed more than 10, 000 pre-recorded videos of parent-child reading interactions in order to get a better sense of what are some social, interpersonal, and physiological factors that keep these individuals engaged. I utilized AWS Transcribe and similar services to process those videos and approximately 60 transcript files to get accurate speech timestamps of each video (This technique is called forced alignment
Software Engineer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT• June 2019 - December 2019
In my freshman summer, I worked in the Personal Robots Group in the MIT Media Lab. I was part of the team that focused on using Jibo, one of the first social robots, to help 5-6 years old children learn how to read and how to pronounce English words. In order for the robot-children interaction to be as engaging as possible, I developed an interactive User Interface that used React Native for the frontend and Rosbridge for connecting to Jibo. Additionally, I also completed other side projects in this lab. For example, we found out that Jibo did not pronounce correctly the name of some children. As a result, I developed an interface that allows users with the ability to check the pronunciation of our robot and change it if necessary. I also wrote several scripts for the different types of interactions the robot could experience so that children would have the sense that the robot is not automized to always say the same.
Lab Assistant
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT• February 2019 - May 2019
I assisted students weekly to debug their code and better understand the programming concepts taught in lectures for the MIT class 6.009: Fundamentals of Programming. This class is focused on Python programming, and it is designed to develop skills in applying basic methods from programming languages to abstract problems. Each lab consisted of software design, construction, and implementation of it.
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
Computer Science, BS