William Howard-Snyder

Seattle, WA 98105 · (360) 707-1519 · william122899@gmail.com

I am a senior studying computer science and philosophy at the Univeristy of Washington. My academic interests include machine learning with an eye towards applying these solutions to biology and medicine.

This summer I was accepted into UW's combined BS/MS program! I will begin graduate coursework this year, but won't officially be a Master's student until Fall of 2022. My current plan is to graduate with an MS in June 2023, and hopefully start as PhD student the year after. I am very excited to use this opportunity to pursue my interests in machine learning, especially as it relates to improving health and promoting biological discoveries!

Experience

Research Assistant

University of Washington

OnClass: Helped implement the algorithm and accompanying (open source) software package that uses the Cell Ontology to classify single-cell RNA sequences that are seen or unseen at training time. My contributions include implementing a PyTorch model of the neural network in OnClass, and improving the memory efficiency of the full algorithm from ~25 GB to under 8 GB.

Senior Thesis: I am continuing to work with Professor Sheng Wang as he is supervising my senior thesis. The topic has to do with detecting novel cell-types and discovering where they might be in the Cell Ontology.

June 2021 - Present

Teaching Assistant

University of Washington

Led a weekly review section of 25 students for the course CSE 312: Probability and Statistics. I also had other TA responsibilities such as grading, holding office hours, and designing high quality slides/worksheets. In my last quarter TAing (out of 3), I was the head section TA, and designed the lesson plan for the sections that TAs held. This involved curating questions and review materials weekly, as well as presenting the section plan to the rest of the teaching staff.

June 2020 - March 2021

Philosophy Writing Tutor

University of Washington

Reviewed the papers and assignments of undergraduate students enrolled in philosophy classes by critiquing the structure of their arguments and writing.

October 2019 - June 2020

Education

University of Washington

Bachelor of Science
Computer Science

GPA: 3.9

September 2018 - June 2022

University of Washington

Bachelor of Arts
Philosophy

GPA: 3.9

September 2018 - June 2022

Projects

Deep Learned Compact Image Representations for Efficient Retrieval

This is the final project for a graduate class I took on deep learning. The idea is that given a query image and a database of images, I want to rank the images in the database according to how similar they are to that query image (like Google’s image search) by comparing the 2048 dimensional ResNet extracted features (the ones right before the final fully connected layer is applied). I evaluate this image retrieval system on ImageNet 1k across a variety of ANN data structures (like Kd trees, LSH tables, and HNSW graphs) using metrics like accuracy, MAP@50, query time, and space.

Interests

When I'm not studying or doing homework, I enjoy spending time outdoors. In the winter, I am an avid snowboarder. During the warmer months here in Washington, I enjoy hiking, kayaking, and playing tennis.

I also like to spend time indoors playing board games with friends, or reading sci-fi novels. I'm a huge fan of the Red Rising series, and am currently working my way through the Expanse!