João Alfredo Cardoso Lamy

Expected Graduation Date
2025

Major
Computer Science

Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Data and Information Systems

Research Mentor
George Chacko

Research Description
Dense Sub-graph Extraction Workflow

Biography

I took part in the AWS DeepRacer team at the school entity Insper Dynamics. We learned about the PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) algorithm used by Amazon in the competition, mainly through tinkering with the reward function of the robotic car, and, to a lesser extent, hyper-parameters. Furthermore, we managed to get to the Pro-League in both seasons we competed (even managing to be included in the top 50 worldwide). We did not learn enough about PPO to be able to create our own artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the competition has been discontinued in Brazil, but I am extremely interested in being a part of anything that has AI as its focus, especially if it includes PPO.

Another area that interests me is Data Science. We had the subject last semester; it was a class that I genuinely looked forward to. This semester, the team that worked on the DeepRacer project was moved to a Kaggle-focused group. So far, we haven’t had the chance to pour a lot of hours into this new challenge, but I’ve managed to create a predictive model by using one of the available datasets (relating to credit scores). I would like to use the opportunity granted to me by the University of Illinois to further my understanding of data science. If any research group requires someone that has Pandas (Python library) experience, I am interested in participating.

Beyond those two, a broader issue that I take to heart is ethics in computing. My first semester had a class that was entirely dedicated to discussing the ethical implications of technological advancements. We discussed black-box AI problems, AI taking over not only repetitive but creative jobs, social media, privacy, etc. I became extremely aware of the dangers these problems pose. If there are any projects that lean in that direction, I would like to participate.