Colton Flowers

As an intern I have built software to facilitate the transcription of endangered languages and helped construct a dialog system to be implemented within a VR system to automate physical therapy instruction. I have just recently accepted a Graduate research position with the Biosphere, where I will be analyzing how best to statistically organize and then automatically classify soundscapes: collections of acoustic data from a specific environment. Aside from microbrewing and collecting new music, I am most interested in sequence-to-sequence models, transfer learning, and one-shot translation. It is important to me that any application of machine learning/AI with which I am involved is human-centric... Double points if it is humanities-centric! As someone who has had past difficulty overcoming barriers to entry in one of several STEM fields, including the one I am in right now, I am motivated to bring accessible computer science/math education to students of all experience levels and backgrounds, both within the classroom and outside. To this end, I joined the Hack Arizona 6.0 team as Director of Education--and with the help of other UA students passionate about cultivating the local CS community--put on 35+ workshops on a variety of CS topics in January of 2020. As the director First-Byte, I have hosted and will continue to host workshops throughout the semester to connect community leaders, UA faculty, and UA students in the hopes that this connection will augment their formal education or provide them easy access to the world of CS if they are hoping to get their feet wet for the first time. To grow as an education organizer, I have begun hosting my own workshops about Computation Theory and Computational Linguistics and teaching intro Python classes at the high school level as a Microsoft TEALS volunteer. It is important to me that I have thought as long about my material as I have thought about the most effective way to present said material. In my capacity as both a researcher and an educator, it is my intention to progress my field and others within it.