Alex Scarlatos

I've been a research assistant in the ML4ED lab, where I've primarily been researching LLM applications to tasks in mathematics education. See my Research page for the list of papers I've published during my time here. I have also been a teaching assistant for CS 240 - Reasoning Under Uncertainty (Probability Theory).

I was a student researcher on the amazing Magenta team, working with Dr. Anna Huang. During my time there I built an interface for musical collaboration between humans and AI, and I'm excited to give more details soon!

At Bloomberg, I worked in the real-time enterprise data department as a full stack software engineer. My team revamped our whole workflow on a modern web stack (React/Flask/Postgres), where I was integral in both the development and design of the new architecture. I was also involved in developing and designing tools for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), such as automated release systems and credential management frameworks, to make releasing code easier and more secure. I mentored 3 incoming team members by teaching them our business logic, helping them learn new technologies, and guiding them on projects. I have also given multiple presentations and live demos to both engineering and business teams.

AVI is a software contracting company I interned at as a software engineer. I've worked on a variety of projects that involved manipulating data sets, building data visualization tools and developing software for the web. In addition to development, I worked closely with other employees on project planning. I participated in scrum meetings, sprint meetings, and gave presentations to co-workers on research and progress.

Eduware is a small shop that develops exam-building software for secondary school teachers. I was a part-time web developer, working on the software's front-end, server and database within Microsoft's ASP.NET framework. I also worked on smaller projects using Flash and Unity3D. The company was the first major experience I had developing software and I owe them for getting me an early start in the field.

Infinite 320 is a gaming website/framework I created with frontend developer Jim Palmeri. Currently it supports two card games: Oh Shoot and No Thanks. Some features include a ranking/leveling system, AI players, player customization, and emotes.

I developed this project for my undergraduate senior thesis and continued work on it for my Master's project. It's a tool for exploring the possibilities of sound design through spatial manipulation. Users move sound emitting and receiving objects through a room and draw sound barriers, hearing how the soundscape changes as they interact with the space.

A multiplayer board game, centered around the vulnerabilities of digital currency. The game is meant to be a tool to educate on capitalism in a digital world, as well as examine behaviors of players under certain conditions. I built the game with two friends: Joshua Cehulic, who designed the game, and Marisa DePasquale, who created the assets.

A digital/analog hybrid, MIDI-controlled synthesizer, built with an Arduino microcontroller. Users can choose the wave generation function and modify envelope settings to achieve unique sounds. I wrote the code, and the electrical engineering was done by Collin Champagne.

A tool developed for the purpose of syncing video to source audio for films. The code uses Praat to perform a cross-correlation on the video's audio and all external audio clips. Then based on the max value of the CC result and the start/end time of the matching segment, the optimal audio clip is selected and stitched onto the video. The audio volume is even optimally gained for an easier post-production experience.

My team and I analyzed the salary book for the state of Iowa employees over several years. We investigated a broad set of hypotheses, focusing on differences in salaries between genders, effects of a person's place of living on their income, effects of job mobility, salarly distributions between jobs, and the effects of inflation and world events on salaries.

Source: Ion Stoica et al. Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications. SIGCOMM, 2001.

My teammate and I developed a distributed file system on top of the Chord protocol, a technique for distributing and quickly retrieving resources in a non-centralized network. We implemented an original method for replicating data and rebalancing the network when a node fails.

A program that allows users to do statistical analysis, trimming, and visualization on education-related World Bank data. Multiple education variables and well-being variables are associated with nations across several years. The correlation between each pair of variables is calculated and displayed as a starting point for data exploration, and users can then drill down into the results and view graphs of any pair of variables. Users also have a variety of ways to filter the dataset, including by year, region, and k-means clustering.

A program that, given a source texture, extends the texture or renders a target image using that texture. The algorithm originates in the 2001 paper "Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer" by Alexei A. Efros and William T. Freeman.

During my time at Eduware, I developed 2 games in Unity3D as a side project. Darth Catman is a Temple Runner clone, where you play inside the dream of a fictional non-trademarked character. And Plane N' Gain is like Helicopter meets Flappy Bird, with an original soundtrack. Unfortunately, these were built a while ago (in web player days) so they will only run on Firefox with a download, if at all. Because of this, I will soon be digging up old executables and recording screen captures.

I've been writing various, unassociated compositions since my Freshman year of college. The pieces range in style from EDM to Metal to Experimental. My Soundcloud can be found here, for which I go under the name AloneInDecember.

During Summer 2015, I co-created a 53 minute album with my friend Shea Glasheen, which was later released on Codex Rag Records. It spans a variety of genres, from alternative rock to experimental electronica. My primary role for the album was production and mixing, though I did some composition and performance as well. The Bandcamp for the album can be found here.