My name is Jefferson Ridgeway, IV.  I am a senior at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) located in Elizabeth City, North Carolina with a major in computer science and minor in mathematics.  My love for computers started in ninth grade and has grown ever since. This love transferred into the decision to major in computer science while at ECSU.

During freshman year, I became a recipient of the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) scholarship.  Through this scholarship program, participants are able to partake in an array of research opportunities and scholarly activities. These activities include programming classes, attending and presenting at conferences, as well as performing research through the academic year and in the summer via internships.

My very first research experience was on the CERSER multimedia team (spring 2014) investigating the update of the CERSER TeraScan Cataloguing System and the TeraScan Image Processing Script.  Through the use of programming languages such as PHP, MySQL, HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver and TeraScan software, the team developed a greater understanding of the usage of TeraScan software. This usage also included how to annotate images, add grids and overlays to the images, and construct a prototype for a database.

The next engagement in research presented itself during the summer of 2014 in an Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington, Indiana.  This research experience consisted of making a Graphical User Interface (GUI) online for the Cloudmesh database at IU.  In order to accomplish this task, it was critical to learn Python programming syntax and Django, which is a web development framework.  Using both the framework’s components and Python syntax, I was able to successfully complete the GUI and input data (such as user accounts, committees, etc.) that was stored in a no-Structure Query Language (no-SQL) MongoDB database.  

As a second semester sophomore being a participant in CERSER, the third academic research experience included documenting the site preparation of new ground stations at ECSU. The goal of the research was to have a detailed account of the new hardware, software systems, and their functionality from SeaSpace.  The new hardware systems included 15 new visualization stations, 2 monitoring systems, a TeraVault raw storage device, and a TeraScan Rapid Environmental X-treme (TREX) high-powered processor.  The new software included an updated version of TeraScan, GUI’s for TeraVision and TeraMaster, and the CentOS, which is a Linux-based operating system.

During the summer of 2015 I studied the change-impact analysis of Android applications at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. In this research, the team was tasked with gathering android applications that had bugs (errors in application that cause issues for the users' Android smartphones) invoked by a specific change within the applications. This change could be related to the code of the application and/or library change. In reviewing these Android applications, two applications were picked for a case study to understand the impact of the application as a whole.

As a junior and participant of CERSER, the research that was completed in the spring of 2016 focused on identifying, evaluating, and implementing a video conference solution at ECSU, which included testing different software’s such as Google Hangout, Skype, and Join.me with new acquired Logitech conference hardware. Google Hangout proved to be the best solution at ECSU.

In the last summer as an undergraduate, I completed my summer research at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). The focus on my research included investigating methods of locating and extracting, and ingesting a subset of scientific reports from the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) into the Watson Content Analytics (WCA) software tool. The research also focused on documenting the ingestion process for NASA WCA administrators as well as the Python code that was written in order to expedite the pre-processing phase of ingestion.

The NASA internship experience rewarded me with a new focus on the field of data science. I would like to pursue a Master’s Degree in Data Science once I have completed my bachelor’s degree at ECSU. I plan on reaching this goal by continuing to engage in research and internship programs that will give me the knowledge, skills, and experiences needed for my growth in this field of study.