hi there!

I’m Sam, a computer scientist and graduate student currently at the University of Oklahoma. My academic interests are centred around distributed systems, databases, parallel computing, and machine learning. I’ve done a few programming projects – for class and for fun – that I’m pleased with, which I’ve listed below.

I am proficient in JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C, C++, R, SQL, Java, and Python. I have academic experience in machine learning, distributed computing, database development, and creating webservices. I currently expect to graduate from university in December 2024. I intend to enrol in a PhD in Computer Science after that. I have the right to work without sponsorship in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

curriculum vitae

Master of Science in Computer Science, 2024

• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, United States
• Currently in progress (current GPA: 4.00/4.00)

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, 2023

• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, United States
• Graduated with distinction (GPA: 3.71/4.00)
• Minor in Mathematics

reports

• S Bird. Collective communication on the Schooner supercomputer. School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma. 16 August 2024.

projects

I do programming projects both for school and for fun. There are a few I’m particularly proud of:

• mysql-server is a modification to the base MySQL server to add support for a few fulltext indexing methods. MySQL already supports these, but it was good to reimplement inverted indexes and suffix trees from scratch by extending the CSV engine. While very much a ‘proof of concept’, it was a fun challenge, though probably the trickiest project I’ve had to complete at university to date. The performance boost is significant, about 10x faster than a stock InnoDB lookup, but this solution would struggle to scale.
• collectives was my first research project for my master’s degree. It examined how seven commonly used collective communication operations, implemented in three different ways, compared against each other across a range of input sizes. Effectively, it was an examination of how quickly different implementations performed on OU’s Schooner supercomputer, while also enhancing my programming skills in a distributed memory environment.
• openscope-ml was my final project for an artificial intelligence class I took, based on an open source air traffic control simulator called openScope that I contributed to occasionally years ago. It’s a thorough introduction to reinforcement learning, and a good example of how existing systems – even one as simple as a JavaScript game – could be retrofitted to incorporate AI agents into their operation.
• I’ve done the Hacklahoma hackathon a few times with my friend Anthony, and you can see our 2022 project on GitHub, where we wrote a vaccine passport website. Some of it was written at 4am during a hackathon, but it is a functional website that implements several API endpoints, and it won 3rd prize.

contact me

I have two email addresses:

• sam.bird AT ou DOT edu for things related to academics
• sam AT sambird DOT org will work for everything else

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.