My name is Tori Wilbon and I am a junior at Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina majoring in computer science with a concentration in information systems and minoring in GIS/Remote Sensing. I chose to pursue a Computer Science degree because technology, computers and programming in general interest me. Computer science also opens the door to a vast amount of jobs. My main goal is to obtain a broad knowledge of different areas, this is the reason I chose to concentrate in information systems and minor in GIS/Remote Sensing.

During the summer of 2013, I participated in a summer research program, Viking Enhancing of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (VESTEM) at Elizabeth City State University. This program provided an in-depth introduction of the research process. The project our group worked on was “Analysis of 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, because the brine shrimp did not survive.

I was awarded the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) scholarship under Dr. Linda Hayden, the Principal Investigator of the CERSER program. This program has provided me travel to a conference, and a job fair. The program also trained me in GPS, GIS, digital cameras, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Dreamweaver and knowledge of programming languages such as CSS, JavaScript, Python and Perl. 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. The focus of this research was on processing images from a TeraScan system to a database by using the languages PHP and MySQL. The imagery problems from the CERSER server directory were corrected and we also updated the 2011 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 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 determine the performance to see which program 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.

The spring semester of 2015, I was apart of 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. The steps that taken place in this project was setting up the fifteen visualization stations, the two monitoring stations, and documenting what the SeaSpace contractors did, which was repositioning the two GOES ground stations and rewiring them.

The summer of 2015, I returned to IUB to do an internship in Dr. Geoffrey Fox’s lab. My mentor was Mr. Jerome Mitchell, who also graduated from ECSU and now is a Ph.D. student at Indiana University. The project was titled “Developing an Active Contours Model for Layer Detection from Polar Radar Imagery”. The purpose of the project was to create a program that automatically extracts the surface and bedrock layers from the Antarctic radar images, helping glaciologist, who previously had to go through 1000’s of images manually.

I want to continue to participate in internships to get more experience, and then attend graduate school. After this summer internship of working with data visualization, I have become more interested in the field, and want to do more work in the data visualization field in later years. Working in this field will require high level of programming skills, which will give me options to choose in the computer science field.

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