Lou Schlessinger

About

Hello!

My name is Lou Schlessinger.

I was a student at Washington University in St. Louis studying computer science and physics. I graduated in December 2018 with a B.S. and M.S. in computer science. My primary research interests are in automated machine learning, meta-learning, and the intersection of AI and quantitative reasoning.

Research

Compositional kernel encoding

Automated Model Search Using Bayesian Optimization and Genetic Programming
Louis Schlessinger, Gustavo Malkomes, Roman Garnett
3rd Workshop on Meta-Learning at NeurIPS 2019, Vancouver, Canada

Kernel tree

Automated Kernel Search using Evolutionary Algorithms
Louis Schlessinger
Master's Project, Washington University in St. Louis, May 2019

Projects

Procedurally generated terrain

Procedural Terrain Generation   After reading about fractals and their applications in technology, I learned about fractal terrain generation and how it can be used to create stunningly realistic landscapes using a relatively simple algorithm. I created a WebGL rendering implementation of a terrain generator that was based on a 3d-projected terrain map on a canvas element implementation. It uses the Diamond Square Algorithm to procedurally generate terrain.

Image quilting synthesis results

Image Quilting  An implementation of "Image Quilting for Texture Synthesis and Transfer" (Elfros & Freeman, 2001).

Correlation matrix of adult dataset

Income Prediction  An evaluation of several machine learning methods applied to the Adult Data Set to predict income.

Global Terrorism Database clustering

Global Terrorism Geo-Clustering in Spark   A visualization of k-means clustering on terrorist attack locations. It contains more than 170,000 terrorist attacks from all over the world from 1970 to 2016. I implemented k-means in PySpark to cluster the different geo-locations of the terrorist attacks.

Artisanal chocolate ratings bar chart

Artisanal Chocolate Exploration  A D3 visualization of artisanal chocolate companies and ratings using expert review data from the Manhattan Chocolate Society.

Electoral map cartogram

Electoral Map  A D3 cartogram of U.S. presidential elections ranging from 1940 to 2016.

Generic image of code

Algorithms  A collection of algorithms I have implemented in various languages consisting of topics ranging from machine learning to multi-agent systems. For example, this repository contains my implementations of AdaBoost, neural networks, the auction algorithm, etc.

Generic image of stocks

Bayesian Stock Price Prediction  An evaluation of stock price prediction algorithms using analyst ratings.

Traffickcam main activity screenshot

TraffickCam Android App   An app that enables you to help combat sex trafficking by uploading photos of the hotel rooms you stay in when you travel. I developed the TraffickCam Android app on the Google Play Store while working in the Media and Machines Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. More information about TraffickCam and the Exchange Initiative is available through the website, traffickcam.com.

Snackhack dashboard

SnackHack   A web service and Android app that leverages Twitter's Geolocation API and Wash. U. network data to provide real-time information on just how crowded every restaurant on campus is. It displays in real-time just how crowded a restaurant really is. I made this as part of a team of four students for WUHack 2014 (Washington University in St. Louis's 40-hour Hackathon). We won the Grand Prize and the OpenDNS Prize.

Reddit communities

Reddit Community Detection  A survey of community detection algorithms on Reddit data described in the paper Detection and Analysis of Subreddit Communities.

USATT rating analyzer demo

USATT Rating Analyzer   A Gradio web app that helps you analyze USA table tennis (USATT) tournament and league results by providing basic statistics and visualizations of the player's performance over time.

Scroll ink prediction

Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize (runner-up)  A method to detect ink in the carbonized micro-CT scans of the Herculaneum Papyri. We ended up submitting these results and receiving a runner-up award for the 2023 Grand Prize (read more about the story here).

Scroll curvature

Vesuvius topogeo   A topological and geometric analysis comparing and contrasting scrolls and fragments from the Vesuvius Challenge to better understand the domain differences.

Math problem classification

Math problem classification  A method to classify the category of a math problem. This model is a fine-tuned version of bert-base-uncased on the part of the MATH (competition_math) dataset. Specifically, it was trained as a multi-class, multi-label model on the problem text.

Contact