Desarae Hartley

About me

My name is Mack and I am currently a senior computer science major at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. During my undergraduate career I gained a diverse range of experience and education. I have worked in both government and private sectors which have ranged from small startups (17 employees) to large corporations (180,000). My software experience includes projects that involve the property, healthcare, and tech industries. Working in such diverse fields has taught me how to learn, adapt, and succeed in new environments.

Outside of work and the classroom I enjoy weightlifting, playing guitar and traveling. Feel free to ask me about any of these as well!

Macathon 2017 - 3rd Place

Nov 2017

Team size: 4 Members

For this year our team wanted to try to solve an issue pertaining to healthcare problems in suburban and urban regions of Africa. We decided to make a system that helps individuals keep records of their health care visits on the cloud. Currently, a large amount of patients in many regions of Africa get their medical diagnoses in paper form, which are very easy to lose. What we proposed was a "Portable Medical Record" system, PMR. This system allows individuals to sign up for an online account containing the patient's medical information which can be viewed on a web page, meaning that doctors and clinics don't have to install any software to view patient files.

For this project our prototype consisted of a frontend mock up website with Twitter-Bootstrap. We also planned and presented our technical reach goals including implementing AES block encryption (CBC mode) for patient files, hosting our database on S3, and creating an Android app instead of a web app which would handle intermittent connectivity better.

Macathon 2016 - Presented

Feb 2016

Team size: 6 Members

At Macalester, many students choose to buy their classes textbooks off other students who have taken these same classes before them. We wanted to streamline this process for students by creating an online marketplace to buy and sell used textbooks within your college. Four of our team members were in charge of working out the logistics and business model of this project while the other two of us constructed the prototype web app.

Macathon 2015 - Presented

Feb 2015

Team size: 6 Members

Our team set out to create a web service that would streamline the process for individuals and business owners purchase energy efficient appliances and equipment at a lower price. We developed a business model for our project idea and a prototype web service.

MacWeekly News Reader - View on GitHub - View on PlayStore

Oct 2016 - Present

Android (and soon to be iOS) app that pulls data from college news paper website API.

Parallel Implementation of gzip Using Rust

Nov 2017 - Present

Work in Progress

In an attempt to speed up the compression time of the popular gzip tool, my project partner and I are implementing the "Deflate" portion of the gzip algorithm using a popular parallel processing language, Rust. We are currently attempting to create our own implementation for the Lempel Ziv 77 algorithm which is mostly responsible for the compression part of gzip.

Text Based Sentiment Analysis Tool

Oct 2017 - Dec 2017

Using IBM Watson Tone Analyzer this tool analyzes the emotions present in a given body of text. The output of the IBM Tone Analyzer is collected as a Json file and then used to train a Naive Bayes classifer using Scikit-Learn and Python. The result is an algorithm that can be used to predict whether a given body of text has an overall positive emotional value to it (happy, excited, etc) or a negative emotional value (sad, angry, etc). So far the algorithm has a 91.5% success rate for classifying bodies of text.

Facial Recognition and Delaunay Triangulation Algorithm

Oct 2017 - Dec 2017

Algorithm that recognizes faces in a picture or webcam, plots the facial landmarks of the detected face, then applies a Delaunay triangulation of the plotted points. Utilizes C++, OpenCV for image processing, DLib for facial recognition.

Weather Info App - View on GitHub

May 2017

Mobile app that allows users to select their location and get up to date weather info on a given location.

AndWallet - View on GitHub

April 2017

Mobile budgeting app that helps users track expenses, income and net worth.

ShopIt - View on GitHub

March 2017

Shopping app that allows users to create a checklist of items they need to buy for future shopping trips.

ScratchQs - View on GitHub

Oct - Dec 2016

Javascript and Python/Django website that replicates functionality of Quora.

Poll-inator - View on GitHub

Sept - Oct 2016

Python/Django web app that allows users to start polls at any time and find other polls to vote on.