Carlos Paradis

Data Scientist

I am a data scientist employed by KBR as a federal contractor for NASA. I hold a MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a MS in Software Engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology. I am also a honor member of IEEE-HKN and ACM-UPE by the same institutions, a lifetime member of ACM, and a recipient of the Science Without Borders scholarship.

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Location: 94035, Mountain View, California, USA
Email: cvas@hawaii.edu
Website: http://carlosparadis.com

GitHub: GitHub: carlosparadis
DBLP: DBLP
NTRS: NTRS
ORCID: ORCID: 0000-0002-3062-7547

Experience

May 2020 – present

Applied Researcher in Natural Language Processing - Federal Contractor at KBR - NASA Ames Research Center

Applying Natural language Processing (NLP) technologies to streamline the development and certification process for NASA missions

Develop a NLP capability to parse mission documents using machine learning techniques
Look for potential problems (such as contradictions or potential safety issues)
Evaluate the results with the help of mission developers
List of public released and published work can be found here: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search?author=Carlos%20Paradis

Jan 2020 – May 2021

Graduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa - Shidler School of Business

Create a system to analyze software vulnerabilities evolution by mining software repositories ecosystems

Identify prospective methods to identify poor software development process in collaboration, coordination and communication
Identify prospective methods to identify poor architectural practices
Create a method to construct timelines of software vulnerabilities
Perform a case study in OpenSSL applying identified methods, in particular Heartbleed
Create an R package implementing final methodology, and reproducible results
Docs/Demo: http://itm0.shidler.hawaii.edu/kaiaulu
Conference Article: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_6
Pre-Print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14570

Jul 2018 – May 2021

Graduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa - Shidler School of Business

Identify novel safety incidents based on textual narratives for NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS)

Definition and analysis of the performance, stability and random effects of unsupervised text clustering algorithms
Definition of a protocol and design of survey heuristics to assess the stability of machine learning results
Identify published methodologies for interpretation of text clustering results
Define an IRB compliant survey protocol for evaluation of different text clustering interpretation methodologies
Reuse and improvement of Legacy Code, and creation of data pipelines to supply data visualization tools
Demos: 1) http://www2.hawaii.edu/~cvas/topicflow/ ; 2) http://www2.hawaii.edu/~cvas/termite/
Create an R package implementing final methodology, and reproducible results
Docs/Demo: http://itm0.shidler.hawaii.edu/kaona
Conference Article: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-1981

May 2017 – Apr 2020

Intern/Data Analyst at Staffing Solutions at Kaiser Permanente

Designed and enhanced databases for predictive and prescriptive analytics
Designed and evaluated the effectiveness of statistical, probabilistic, and machine learning models
Elicited requirements, goals, and priorities from clinical and technical subject matter experts
Participated in the development of potential solutions, including outcome and process measures, and technical specifications
Translated needs, issues, and ideas into improved processes for patient care
Formulated specific implementation plans and evaluated the effectiveness of actions/programs implemented
Communicated results/recommendations to project sponsors, clients, and various senior level audiences

Aug 2016 – Mar 2020

Graduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa & University of Maryland

Identified CVE-related Software Vulnerability Discourse on Online Mailing List using Topic Modelling

Created Python Crawler to parse HTML Mailing Lists
Created taxonomy to classify different pre-processing strategies of raw corpus
Coded review student work via Github's pull requests
Performed Topic Modelling using R and LDA
Conference Article: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA.2018.00121

Nov 2016 – Dec 2019

Graduate Research / Data Engineer at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa - School of Architecture

Python coded data pipelines for sensor data processing, database storage, and R coded thermal comfort analyses. Performed Unix server administration duties to support architecture researchers.

Simplified knowledge management and workflow between supervisor and students from architecture, engineering, and computer science
Proposed and code-reviewed a new continuous python sensor data collection plug-in architecture for the lab in Python, Lonoa (github.com/erdl/lonoa)
Implemented and explained model constraints for ASHRAE-55 PMV/PPD and Adaptive thermal comfort models (github.com/erdl/thermal_comfort).
Provided System Administrator support for the lab (SSH Access, Unix Package Management, and Security)
Proposed, designed, and code reviewed two Raspberry PI Environmental Projects (awarded Intel NCS Funding)
Designed database schema and code reviewed survey station code for environmental experiments (github.com/erdl/survey_admin)
Mentored undergraduate and master student projects
Conference Article: http://www.arcc-arch.org/past-conferences/ (ARCC 2019 Conference Proceedings)

May 2018 – Aug 2018

Intern II at SGT at NASA Ames Research Center

Created a model of an attack surface between military drone communication by inserting a ‘liar’ script at the communication boundary using OpenUxAS, developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Conference Article: doi.org/10.2514/6.2019-0770

Sep 2015 – Dec 2018

Graduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa & Siemens

Identified associations between software companies’ organizational structure and their software products.

Created scripts to calculate metrics from version control systems and issue trackers
Defined static metrics to evaluate graph motifs on code collaboration social networks and discussion social networks
Conference Poster: icse2018.org/event/icse-2018-posters-poster-conway-law-or-not-
Journal Article: To appear on IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

Jan 2015 – Aug 2015

Graduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa & HECO

Performed data mining/analytics of weather related data for renewable (solar) energy management in Hawaiʻi. (Master Thesis)

Created a pipeline to collect data from various sensors across Hawaiʻi
Scrape associated metadata through websites and several visualizations to identify missing or biased values through multiple years
Used cluster methods to address time series granularity, probabilistic and linear models were also used to forecast solar irradiation on different sites
Conference Article: doi.org/10.1109/ICMLA.2015.137

Mar 2015 – May 2015

Graduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa - Office of Public Health Studies

Analyzed cross-sectional surveys conducted in Ethiopia by DHS to identify effects between sanitation and malnutrition.

Performed systematic review (database search, snowballing, and inverse snowballing)
Surveyed, data pre-processed / cleansed and performed correlation analysis of variables of interest

Oct 2013 – Feb 2014

Lecturer at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

Lecturer for Information Systems Major

Databases Lab
Data Structures
Information Retrieval
Material: I used a combination of lecture notes, Latex, ”hand-made” Tikz forms, color, and other visual examples to illustrate abstract concepts for freshman

Jan 2012 – Jan 2013

Undergraduate Teacher Assistant at Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

Teacher Assistant for Computer Science Major

Formal and Automata Languages
Programming Logic for Computer Science
Paradigms of Programming Languages
Activities consisted of giving lectures under professor supervision, assisted in creating material and grading, and organized guests coding dojos

Jan 2012 – Dec 2013

Undergraduate Research at University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa & Drexel University

Identified patterns of effort in software development.

Gathered source code and issue tracker data (website, .xml, .csv, .xlsx) using Python and R and storage (PostgreSQL)
Performed summary statistics and correlation analysis reports
Journal Article: dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2014.11.015

Nov 2012 – Jul 2013

Undergraduate Research at Universidade Federal da Bahia - Formas

Identified patterns that would lead to STEM student retention in U. Federal da Bahia.

Gathered and processed data (PDF format transcripts)
Created schema and data population pipeline of a PostgreSQL database
Performed exploratory data analysis, association rule learning, and literature review.
Conference Article: http://dx.doi.org/10.5753/cbie.sbie.2013.577

Jul 2011 – Mar 2013

Undergraduate Research at Universidade Federal da Bahia

Tracked and analyzed programmer behavior Eclipse IDE usage to better understand the impact of conceptualization in god class detection.

Captured point and click on logs using Eclipse plugins
Collected and processed sequence data (.csv)
Performed exploratory data analysis and process mining
Conference Article: doi.org/10.1145/2460999.2461007

Volunteer

Aug 2023 – present

Stakeholder/Mentor - ICS 496 at University of Hawaii at Manoa

I serve as a stakeholder/mentor for UH Manoa ICS 496 Capstone projects. The students contribute code and posters (https://github.com/sailuh/kaiaulu_cheatsheet/tree/main/poster) to the open source tool Kaiaulu, which was part of my PhD dissertation also at UH Manoa, and has since been published in a number of scientific works. See project URL for posters, or the tool GitHub (https://github.com/sailuh/kaiaulu) for their contributions.

Jan 2018 – Jan 2021

External Reviewer at Journal of Aerospace Information Systems (JAIS)

Jan 2021 – Jan 2021

Shadow Program Committee Member at Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

Jan 2021 – Jan 2021

Reviewer at IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)

Jan 2018 – Jan 2019

Program Committee Member at International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA)

Jan 2017 – Jan 2018

Intel Nervana AI Academy Student Ambassador at Intel Nervana

Jan 2017 – Jan 2017

Volunteer at Code for Hawaiʻi

I facilitate open-budget access for state of Hawaiʻi citizens, allowing them to make more informed decisions in choosing their state representatives by providing additional accessibility to candidates financial ties: Data cleaning and text linkage of various records concerning candidates campaign contribution distributed on different official pages of the state of Hawaiʻi are put together for navigation on a single website.

Jan 2016 – Jan 2016

External Reviewer at EDBT/ICDT 2016 Joint Conference

Jan 2015 – Jan 2016

Volunteer at Open Knowledge Brazil

I volunteered as a data analyst for the Open Spending team of Open Knowledge Brazil Chapter, which was a finalist on Google Impact Challenge in Brazil. The project goal was to analyze the city and state of São Paulo, and also the federal’s fiscal year budget, serving as case study to implement the same method and tools to other cities. Mainly, the project sought to read between the government’s budget lines and understand where tax money was spent. My role in the team was to help write data stories, finding and exploring what data was available in existing outdated websites, and help make it available of it through our website and/or API. I also explored in parallel the open spending of Salvador, another city in Brazil and my hometown as both city and state’s budget data availability.

Jan 2015 – Jan 2016

Volunteer at Science without Borders Network 'Rede CsF'

Rede CsF is a non-profit organization based in Brazil and created by students who were awarded the Science Without Border scholarship from Brazil government. The non-profit is a return on investment to create projects in the country to improve science, technology, innovation and education. Within the network, I collaborate on the Open Data Awareness Project and the Intranet, the laterto coordinate over 40 contributors activities.

Jan 2010 – Jan 2011

Chair of Student Chapter at Association for Computing Machinery

I founded the first and only ACM student chapter of Brazil. Main chapter activities were initially focused on raising awareness and supporting local computer science events. The chapter was featured on XRDS, the student magazine of ACM, on its first semester.