Michael Blum

Defining Possible.

I was hired by Northrop Grumman to contribute to the physical security team within one of their Defense Systems programs, but I ended up becoming the technical lead for a simulation project before that came to fruition.

Exceptional service in the national interest.

My primary focus at SNL was initially on developing software for satellite ground systems as part of the Global Security program. This work typically involves designing and writing Java to build and update applications and backend processes for many different purposes, such as tasking, scheduling, commanding, controlling, and monitoring state-of-health for remote sensing systems.

I eventually moved on to other projects where I was the lead developer on both front-end and back-end systems for object tracking applications. I was part of a pioneering effort to bring SNL’s classified computing capabilities up to the modern era.

A creative technology company that crafts digital experiences and enterprise solutions for global brands.

At Codazen, I worked in a small team with just a few other data scientists to identify and implement machine learning solutions for many different kinds of business problems.

Towards the end of my time there, our work focused on computer vision and natural language processing applications in order to help our customers improve their branding.

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) provides undergraduate students and mentors the opportunity to work together on research or creative projects.

Before beginning my own research, I volunteered as an undergraduate research assistant at the Integrated Multi-Physics (IMP) Lab in the College of Engineering. The head of the lab, Dr. Pania Newell, strongly encouraged me to pursue the UROP program and engage in my own research. Following her suggestion, I applied and was granted the opportunity to conduct my own research through the lab with financial support from the university.

The IMP lab focuses primarily on nanoscale porous media, such as amorphous silica. The project Dr. Newell and I came up with was an investigation into the coupled effects that fracture orientation and pore size have on amorphous silica at the atomic level. In order to carry out this investigation, I had to quickly learn how to use LAMMPS, a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation software, and OVITO, a MD visualization program.

As a result of my efforts, I was included as a co-author on two papers, which you can view through my ORCiD profile.

For my Master’s Degree, I elected to do the course-only option and took a deep dive into topics that interested me, such as advanced algorithms, robotics, and deep learning.

For my Bachelor’s degree, I initially started out as a Physics major. I worked towards that degree for about two years before making the decision to switch to Computer Science.

My CS electives included: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, Robotics, Computer Networks, and Web Browser Internals. Of these classes, AI and VR were my two favorites.

This is the primary project I spent most of my time working on during the last two years of my employment at Codazen. It is a collection of in-house-built machine learning tools intended to aid designers in crafting branded experiences.

I built most of the backend features that currently exist for this collection of apps, including all of our internal devops tools and CI/CD pipelines. The two backend features I built that I am most proud of are the custom search engine and the color palette generator, both of which are free to try at time of writing.

I created this project mostly as a way for me to learn the basics of HTML canvas and JavaScript.

The Gameday Analytics Challenge is an annual data analysis event put on by the University of Utah’s School of Business. The objective is for the participating students to dig into a bunch of tweets about Super Bowl ads and present on any findings they may encounter.

When I participated, we were given 500,000 tweets to work with. My team and I dug through the data and constructed a few graphs relating to viewer response (positive/negative), which quarter is the best to advertise during, and which ads were talked about the most and at what times.

This event was a special production put on by the University of Utah’s School of Business in conjuction with Layton Construction.

The goal of the event was to sift through over 5 million rows of safety data that Layton Construction had collected and present findings on ways they can help increase worker safety.

Awarded to undergraduate students with at least a 3.5 GPA for any given semester. I have been on the dean’s list for every semester that I’ve attended at the University of Utah.

Awarded to students identified for performing meaningful research.

Awarded to students for academic excellence.

Awarded upon entry to the University of Utah for high school transcript and ACT performance.