About me
Hi, my name is Asher and for the past few years I have been busy getting my degrees. First I studied Information Sciences (IS) at the University of Amsterdam and I’m currently pursuing my masters degree in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Both studies fascinate me, because you get to combine knowledge from various expertises like business administration, psychology, computer science and general statistics. Most studies focus on very specific topics, but on the contrary both IS en HCI have a very broad focus. This broad focus gives me the opportunity to understand people from various expertises and combine their input into something innovative.
An example of this combining of expertises is the search engine that I am currently taking care of. With the search engine you can browse speeches from political figures throughout Europe, which started as a project for my bachelor’s thesis. Construction of the website required knowledge about data science to structure hundreds of gigabytes of data, in order to create interpretable information. Information visualization knowledge was then required to make the information interpretable for the average user, bundled with research skills to assess the usability of the search engine. The goal of the website is to give everyone the ability to quickly browse through political opinions by looking at debates. The original dataset contains 27 languages from 25 countries, but all data has been translated to English through machine translation. Here design guidelines from psychology were used with programming skills and target audience research, in order to create this search engine. The website has also been presented at the LREC-COLING 2024 event in Turin, Italy. The paper can be found at: https://aclanthology.org/2024.parlaclarin-1.16/.
Projects
Achievements
In this section I want to talk about the Debate-a-Base website, which was mentioned before in the projects section. This search engine for debates required all previously mentioned skills that I have, which makes it so interesting. First of all it required extensive planning, because a lot of tasks would need to be completed in order to achieve the end result. For example, I had to work on finding the debates, translations for the debates, a suitable search engine, a website hosting space and search engine design guidelines. Afterwards I had to combine everything into one product. For the project itself I was on my own, however I had to work together with other researchers to find and correct translated versions of the debates. Also I had to work together with other researchers in order to construct the paper that would be published later on.
At the stage where I had to combine all required parts for the website, I was required to improvise with the programming skills that I had. I had built a website before, also preprocessed large amounts of data, but I had not yet worked with a search engine that was capable of processing large amounts of data. So I was required to quickly learn using Elastic for Python inside of a Docker environment. Last, after the building of the website, I was required to apply my learned research methods in order to test the website’s performance with potential users. Overall this project tested my skills, but through careful planning and quick learning I accomplished my task.
Future plans
In the future I plan to work on projects for different companies, so I get exposed to a large variety of different scenarios. From these scenarios I hope to learn to expand my skills and to also get an insight into which specific domains are not yet up to modern standards. For this reason I don't have a specific company or field in mind and I like to work with the things that come onto my path, instead of having a fixed plan and accidentally ignoring all interesting things outside of that scope.