Derek Helms
Hello! I am a recent grad student from Oregon State University, where I obtained my MS in Artificial Intelligence. I had started my journey at Sierra Community College in 2015 as a Business major, eventually switching to Accounting, and then Computer Science, and finally transferring to Chico State in the Fall of 2019. While at Chico I completed my B.S. in Mathematics (Statistics focused) and a minor in Computer Science, graduating in May 2022. Following this I continued my education into grad school to study in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and recently graduated in June 2024.
Outside of my education I mainly focus on developing skills in machine learning, applying both what I learn in class and on my own. I’ve worked on projects including image classification of brain tumors, stroke prediction using statistical modeling, and regression modeling for predicting food production needs.
During my time at Chico State, I worked at the Center for Healthy Communities as an Undergrad Research Assistant and Community Health Assistant. The main focus of my work had been being the lead programmer on a series of integrated scripts to manage administration and compensation for a multi-site health survey. I have also worked on revising the BNS3 website I built during my research program (see blog post for more information) in order to prepare it for publication.
During my time at Oregon State, I worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) in the EECS department where I assisted in courses such as: Computer Architecture & Assembly Language (CS 271), Design Engineering & Problem Solving (ENGR 102), and Engineering Computation and Algorithmic Thinking (ENGR 103). I applied my knowledge in a 9 month project (Non-Thesis) in which I collaborated with Washington State University to implement methods for Automated Quality Control for Weather Stations via Historical Data (see blog post for more information).
Thank you for taking a look at my website and I hope you find something you enjoy!
Web Scraping GPU Information with Rvest
In this project, I use R and its library Rvest to scrape Newegg for information about GPUs including price, rating, and model specs. The main emphasis of this project is Web Scraping, Data Cleaning, and Exploratory Data Analysis.
#tidytuesday: TV's Golden Age
In this mini-project, I explore my first data set for the TidyTuesday Project. The purpose of these are for experience with EDA using R for my Undergrad Research Program. This weeks data covers TV dramas from 1990 to 2018, and will help us answer the question: "Is the Golden Age of TV real?".
2021 Summer Undergraduate Research Goals
A brief overview of what I hope to accomplish during my 10 week research internship with the CHC (Center for Healthy Communities). This includes Personal, Academic, and Research Development skills that I aim to learn throughout this experience and how to carry them forward into higher education.
Brain Tumor Detection using SageMaker & TensorFlow
In this project I use TensorFlow and Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy a deep learning model that can accurately classify MRI scans of 4 different types of brain tumors.
Stroke Prediction: Battle of the Learning Methods
In this project I compare the performance of Statistical and Machine Learning models for predicting whether or not a patient will have a stroke on a data set that has a large class imbalance.
Global Food Production vs. Population: Predicting the Future
In this project I create a Polynomial Regression Model to estimate the necessary global food production to support a given population size. The main goal is estimating the 2050 production necessary to support our population, as this is the year eastimated to approach 10 billion people on Earth.