Parmita's Blog

This semester, I did an independent study project and presented at the end-of-semester "Meeting of the Minds" event held at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Throughout the semester, I worked with my advisor, Cori Faklaris--a Ph.D. student and Arnav Mahajan--another undergraduate, on our research project in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Our overall goal was to find a way to predict user behavior regarding their personal cybersecurity actions. While computer applications may have many strong security measures in place, it is often the end user who is the weakest link. (They may accidentally share passwords or leave data unsecured) Despite the multitude of different cybersecurity tools that exist (Password managers, Two Factor Authentication, general caution and awareness online, etc.) many users do not put these tools into practice. Prior research into the matter elaborates on many different theories and models of how users adapt to new techn...

I'm super proud to say that my Kickstart Project has been funded!!!!!! A few months ago I decided to use my 3D printing skills to create a personalized 3D printed photo tag. At my graduation party, I made a personalized tag for each of my guests as a return gift. It was a big hit! Everybody loved having their very own tag. So I decided to turn this into a Kickstarter project to share it with even more people. You can check out it and watch the video here:  kickstarter.com/projects/1957628432/personalized-photo-tag . It has just been funded, so I'm super excited to get started on creating the tags for everyone and shipping them out!

I had a really fun time visiting San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) last week with my friends! One of my favorite pieces there was the piece by Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance. I thought it was really neat that he was inspired by randomness and he even used a random system of color selection in order to make sure that when creating these pieces he wasn't guided by his own subconscious guideline for a certain composition.  That got me thinking about randomness in cs and so I created a little project for generating random grids like the piece above.  I started off with a small Python script using the built-in Turtle graphics library to animate this: But then I decided it would be best to optimize it as a web page using JavaScript instead so it'd be easier to access and view. I also added a button to keep generating new random grids.  You try it out yourself here:  parmita52.github.io/Spectrum-by-Ch...

Create your own web page! For our final Girls Who Code project, we all created our very own web page! I decided to make mine like a sort of virtual business card with information about me. You can check it out here .