About
(5)It is 3:05:21 AM in Evanston, IL
Hello! I'm a first-year student at Northwestern majoring in Computer Science and Comparative Literary Studies.
My research interests span natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and cultural analytics. That is, I want to leverage humanistic theoretical resources to develop computational tools and methods, as well as explore their affordances in the study of cultural objects and cultural production broadly defined.
Elsewhere: 19th- and 20th-century European literature, Sinophone cinema, aesthetics, global modernism. I also take pictures of Chicago and write whatever I want.
On current events in artificial intelligence ethics, tech policy, and computing culture.
Northwestern's premier undergraduate venue for critical writing.
Advised by Prof. Tim Tangherlini (Dept. of Scandanavian Studies; Center for Cultural Analytics). Apprehending narrative in the Icelandic saga with literary-theoretical and computational methods.
Leading software development at the largest intercollegiate hackathon in the Chicago area.
Advised by Prof. Michael Coblenz. Toward ergonomic programming languages and software processes for computational climate scientists.
San Diego County's biggest-ever hackathon run for high schoolers, by high schoolers.
Lightweight JavaScript compiler to enable reactive web programming directly in markdown. Outperforms Virtual DOM-based frameworks like React, Vite in key benchmarks
Building web tooling and interfaces for JavaScript-based game engine.
Advised by Prof. Michael Norman. Systems programming to support analysis of dark matter halos in early universe simulations.
A Theory of Scientific Programming Efficacy
Elizaveta Pertseva, Melinda Chang, Ulia Zaman, Michael Coblenz — 2024 International Conference on Software Engineering
You can reach me via email at melinda [at] u.northwestern.edu. I'm also on Goodreads and Letterboxd.