Vani Sachdev

Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College

About Me





Hi, I’m Vani! I’m currently pursuing a computer science degree, and I’m passionate about using CS to help improve people’s lives.

I’m interested in all sorts of tech — from 90 pound robots to detecting fake images via CNNs to making a portfolio (hi!!), I find CS exciting for all the possibilities and opportunities out there. Currently, I’m looking for an internship (Summer 2023) in either software engineering/development or data science so let me know if there are any interesting opportunities you think I’d enjoy by filling out the form at the end of the site!

Outside of tech, I enjoy writing articles for Font Femme, an all-girls STEM Magazine, reading & reviewing books , and drawing digitally .

Skills

Python

5 years +

Proficient with OpenCV, NumPy, Flask, Django, OpenAI, Pandas, TensorFlow, PyTorch

Java

3 years +

Proficient with object-oriented programming (OOP) principles & Amateur with relational databases (mySQL, MariaDB).

SQL & R

~ 1 year

Amateur with querying & performing data analysis.

Git

4 years +

Comfortable using git as a version control system on large-scale projects.

C++

~ 1 year

Proficient using OOP principles to implement data structures.

Node.js

~ 1 year

Proficient with TS + JS for full-stack development. Comfortable using React Native framework.

Software Experiences

Undergaduate Student Researcher @ HMC

FICUS Lab | Claremont, CA | January 2022 - Present

  • Performing climate modeling at the FICUS lab (an atmospheric chemistry lab) using ML models (RF, CNN, GNN, LSTMs) to predict air quality in the United States.
  • Focusing on understanding bias in training data and optimizing models to predict extreme events.

SWE Intern @ Esri

Esri | Redlands , CA | May 2022 - June 2022

  • Developed 2 VS Code extensions from conception to production to streamline tasks for five internal runtime API teams.
  • Built extensions using Typescript, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Python.
  • Performed code reviews for SQL querying database mapping code for the Java Runtime API team.
  • Awarded Finalist & Won Most Creative Project in the Intern Hackathon for an abortion clinic routing GIS application.

CS Grader/Tutor

Harvey Mudd College | Claremont, CA | August 2021 - May 2022

  • Fall 2021: Graded & Tutored for CS5 Green (Introductory Python Concepts, Recursion, List Comprehensions, Finite State Machines)
  • Spring 2022: Grading & Tutoring for CS60 (Java, Racket, Basic ADTs & Data Structures (Linked Lists, Binary Search Trees, 2D-Arrays, Queues, Stacks, Maps, etc), Recursion, Basic Unit Testing)

CS Coach

EpiSchool | Los Angeles, CA | July 2021 - Present

  • Design front-end MVPs for new start-ups.
  • Coach members one on one on full-stack topics including HTML and CSS, Python,Flask, SQL, JavaScript, and AJAX.

Programming Lead

FIRST Robotics Competition | Carson, CA | August 2016 - June 2020

  • Wrote object-oriented code in Java for a 90 lb robot.
  • Implemented PID control to the motion control system.
  • Designed and programmed a vision processing system that allowed the robot to move autonomously.
  • Won two awards celebrating the autonomous capabilities of the robot.

Project Controls Intern

Port of Long Beach | Long Beach, CA | June 2019 - August 2019

  • Produced Data Visualization tools for capital investment projects.
  • Wrote tools in VBA that eliminated the manual effort for data reconciliation, comparison, and exception handling that save 50-70 hours per quarter.
  • Established a meeting database that aggregated 3 years of data.

projects

Project Euler (2020)

Project Euler is a website that contains a series of increasingly challenging mathematical/computer programming problems. Euler is designed to test a developer's understanding of the fundamental principles of a programming language. My goal is to solve one question (maybe more, maybe less) per day to learn new concepts, strengthen old ones, and eventually, to develop a more “optimized intuition."

First Robotics Competition (2016-2020)

In FRC, I worked with 120 lb robots and gained basic mechanical, electrical, and manufacturing skills. I also learned Java and basic motion control. During my time in robotics, I developed a vision system for automated robot sequencing via camera and got comfortable using git on a large project. Check out our 2019 and 2020 repo to see the cool stuff my robotics team did!

Round Up (2020)

Round Up was a website I created with two friends for the MIT Hackathon. We created visualization tools to assist young students with mathematical concepts. All of the visualization tools were written in Javascript using the Processing library, and the website was written using HTML/CSS with certain elements from the Semantic UI framework.

Corgi CNN (2020-21)

This project trained custom TensorFlow networks for JeVois to detect corgis. The JeVois is a small smart machine vision quad-core camera. I started with a MobileNet network pre-trained on ImageNet and used transfer learning to fine-tune the network. Next I optimized for interference and converted it to TensorFlow Lite so it could run on the JeVois.

0-2 Player Tic-Tac-Toe (2020)

This version of Tic-Tac-Toe allows zero players, one player, or two players to play Tic Tac Toe. I wrote an "AI" player in Python that picked a move. I didn't want all games to end with the AI winning or a tie, so I worked on creating a "medium" intelligence. This project is written in Python with a focus on object-oriented design.

Palette (2021)

Palette locates the most dominant colors in an image using an automated version of the kmeans clustering alogirthm. I acomplished this using elbow plots and panda data frames. I estimated the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic. It is written in Python with a focus on object-oriented design.

Seam-Carving (2021)

Seam Carving Is a pair-programming project that I completed as the final project for CS60: Principles of Computer Science. It’s written in Java and demonstrates object-oriented and dynamic programming paradigms. The project was heavily rooted in computer vision and linear algebra, and its intent was to crop an image by removing the least “important” adjacent pixels in an image. This code is available on GitHub upon request. I recommend reading the wikipedia article on seam carving, it’s really interesting! Code is available upon request.

p-Deepfake (2021)

p-Deepfake is a project primarily written in Python that I worked on with 5 students from the 5C’s as a part of P-ai, a project-based organization exploring and democratizing the interdisciplinary applications of artificial intelligence.Deepfakes are forms of synethic media that can be used to spread fake news. They are extremely difficult to parse, and in this project, we analyzed feature data to determine the relationships between deepfake images and their real counterparts using machine learning algorithms SURF, SIFT, and ORB. This was more of an exploratory than analysis research project.

Moodboard (2022)

Moodboard is inspired by the heat-wave style maps Github uses to visualize a user's commits. It is a Flask application that uses the Spotify API and extracts metadata from a user's current music history to visualize their current mood. Specifically, I graphed the valence, which is audio feature data that measures how happy/sad a song is. (By design, this metric is quite subjective, but I thought it would be fun to visualize how a user's mood changes (or at least their song-choice) over time.)

Forward (2022)

Forward was a project I did with 4 other individuals for the Esri Intern Hackathon Project. We used GIS to design a web application that helped route individuals to the safest abortion clinic to them. Post Roe v Wade legislature was changing a lot and so we also built a live newsfeed (local to the USA) on abortion to ensure that users were making guaranteed safe decisions. We used ArcGIS Arcade, HTML, CSS, JS, Python, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and JavaScript APIs for ArcGIS Online to build this web application. We ended up being finalists and won Most Creative Project!

TODO VS Code Extension (2022)

TODO is a VS code extension using java script, type script, svelte, and webviews that allows a user to maintain a list of tasks (TODOs) they wish to acomplish as a sidebar in VSCode.

Messenger Sentient Analysis (2022)

This project used sentient analysis and predictive machine learning models to analyze the last 3 years of my Messenger data. Code is available upon request.

Contact Me!

If you have any questions or opportunities, please let me know!