I'm a first year computer science grad student at the University of Washington. From 2002 to 2009, I was at MIT where I did Economics '06, EECS '07 and an EECS M.Eng '09 advised by Rob Miller. I also did Math, but MIT doesn't let you triple major. I got jipped.

Keywords: HCI, UW, MIT, end user programming, mechanical turk, web programming, economics, star trek.




Seaweed
Seaweed is an end user programming tool for experimental economics to design experiments and deploy them to the Amazon's Mechanical Turk where they can get participants quickly and cheaply.

TurKit and the Deneme Blog
TurKit is a toolkit for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. TurKit was developed by Greg Little. Greg and I and others post to a Deneme, our blog about experiments exploring MTurk. If you do MTurk experiments, and want to share, we'd love you to post on Deneme.

Mechanical Turk Economics Studies
I collaborate with Harvard PhD student John Horton on measuring key economic statistics on the MTurk human computation market.

Mechanical Turk Resource Discovery to Aid Task Scheduling
I am interested in scraping the MTurk worker interface to get current prices and quantities of tasks, and use that to set prices of new HITs in real time.

Stained Glass Filter
For a project in 6.863 Computational and Digital Photography, I wrote a Matlab script to make an image look as if it were stained glass. It uses a k-means color segmentation algorithm and a clever trick with L*a*b color.




6.470 MIT Web Programming Competition
In 2008 I started this 1-month, very intense web programming class and competition. In 2008 and 2009 I was the chairperson, meaning I raised funds from sponsors, developed most of the cirruculum and did a lot of "taking care of business." Now that I'm at UW, 6.470 2010 is still going strong - $40,000 in sponsorship and approximately 100 students. We mainly teach acronyms: HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery, SQL, database design, PHP, JSON, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, Flex and SilverLight. We also cover security, regular expressions, prototype, and GWT.

I was a teaching assistant for 3 classes at MIT:
  • User Interface Design and Implementation (6.831) Spring 2009
  • Introduction to Java for Engineers (1.00) Spring 2008 and Fall 2009
  • Communication for EECS Majors (6.UAT) Fall 2008





At MIT I lived on 5West in the infamous East Campus Dormitory. One summer, for my one week vacation, I painted 11 murals on the 5West walls. In 2003, I took last place in the First Annual MIT Miss Ugly Competition. I am a card carrying member of the MIT Science Fiction Society. I directed the Protestant Choir at MIT for 3 years.

In August, you can find me at the Official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas. I take costume suggestions year round.

hmslydia@ many different places including: cs.washington.edu, gmail.com, alum.mit.edu