Tell us about yourself and your role at Booz Allen.
I started as a Booz Allen intern in Hawaii in 2015 and joined the company full-time a few months later. In February 2017, I stepped into my current role as a researcher on the Cyber team in Central Maryland. Along with a specialized background in areas including Medieval History, Art History, and Economics, I am passionate about working on innovative and practical ways to bring unique computational thinking to areas of industry and everyday life. I like finding and creating cross-sections between programming and seemingly unrelated fields such as music or even fashion. This has allowed me to both successfully operate as a data scientist and to use a variety of skills to create actionable and holistic data products.
Describe recent opportunities at Booz Allen where you have used your areas of expertise in unique and innovative ways.
As a presenter at PyCon USA 2016, PyCon Italy 2017, and SBP-BRiMS 2017, I had the opportunity to openly pursue my passion for meshing data science with fields outside of STEM. My presentation at last year’s PyCon USA, titled “Discovering the World of Python Through Music,” highlighted both the way music composition can help programmers learn Python and the importance of data structure in music. Earlier this year, I participated in a team presentation at SBP-BRiMS at George Washington University titled “Detecting Emotions and Evocative Text.” The project included using an emotion lexicon (EmoLex) to analyze politically charged articles to pinpoint repeated language usage that consistently evoked a similar emotion. Our goal was to unmask the intent behind the rhetorical choices of the written pieces we analyzed.
Going forward, I was selected as a participant in the FY18 Booz Allen Cyber Technical Innovators Program, a company-sponsored opportunity to develop my technical capabilities and explore collaborative research projects. While in the program, I plan to use a text understanding engine to compare two spoken languages to determine how social media platforms organize the dissemination of content such as advertisements.” Booz Allen offers a wealth of opportunities that have allowed me to use my background and interests, such as music and language, combined with my role as a cyber data science researcher to pursue innovative efforts and potential outputs in data analytics.
