My name is Tori Wilbon and I am a sophomore at Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, NC majoring in computer science.  I chose to pursue a Computer Science degree because I was interested in the technology of computers and the vast amount of jobs that are available. While working in high school it revealed that I had the amplitude with working with computers. 

During the summer of 2013, I participated in a summer research program, Viking Enhancingt of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (VESTEM), at Elizabeth City State University. This program provided an in-depth introduction of the research processes. The project our group worked on was analyzing traditional herbs on Brine shrimp. Mrs. Shanta Armwood Outlaw gave us three processes to use phytochemical screening, refluxation and dilution.  Using these three processes the results of the research were negative.     

I was awarded the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) scholarship under Dr. Linda Hayden is the head of the CERSER program.  This program have provided me travel to a conference and a job fair.  I received training in GPS, GIS, digital cameras, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Dreamweaver.  I am very grateful and excited to see what more is in store for me in this program.                          

During the spring semester of 2014, I was a part of the Multimedia Team, research group, mentored by Jeff Wood. The focus of this research was on processing images from a TeraScan system to a database by using languages PHP and MySQL. The imagery problems from the CERSER server directory were corrected and we also updated the 2011 redesign server script to process the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) images.                      

The summer of 2014, I had an internship at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB).  Dr. Geoffrey Fox, who is a professor in Informatics, directed the lab and my mentor was Mr. Saliya Ekanayake, who is a Ph. D. student at IUB.  The project I worked on was “Evaluating the Performance of MPI Java in FutureGrid”.  The main focus of the project was to convert four programs from Message Passing Interface (MPI) C to MPI Java, then we ran the performance to see which programs ran the quickest.  After getting the results of each program we inserted the results in a Microsoft Excel sheet and graphed each of them.  MPI Java performed close enough to MPI C to say the project was a success.    

This spring semester of 2015, I participated in the TeraScan Team. The project title was Documentation of Site Preparation for Installation of SeaSpace Ground Stations at ECSU. In this project we documented the process of the installation of the ground stations, by setting up the 15 visualization stations, the two monitoring stations and documenting what the SeaSpace contractors did. Which were reprositioning the two GOES ground stations and  rewiring the wires though the conduits.            

I want to attend internships and go to graduate school.  I would also like to minor in GIS/ Remote Sensing and to become certified in web design.  I have researched different occupations and Data Visualization had piqued my interest.  The use of graphics to visually represent data is intriguing to me.  Data visualization can be utilized in the fields of geography and engineering as well as many others. I realize that this will entail high level of programming skills, which will provide me with a wide range of options in the computer world.