Curtis Upshall

Spotlight is a digital tool for managing self-directed study blocks, designed to replace traditional paper-based systems with a secure, cloud-based solution. It provides administrators with valuable insights into how time is utilized during these blocks, enabling better data-driven decisions and fostering an environment where both students and educators can get smarter together.

Developing Spotlight was a rewarding project that addressed significant challenges in the educational landscape. By simplifying scheduling and ensuring smooth transitions between classes, the app supports teachers in managing their workload more efficiently. Additionally, Spotlight's actionable data helps educators offer targeted guidance to students, fostering habits that prepare them for future academic success.

An algorithm to produce an efficient and scalable index that will return all strings of length L such that they appear exactly R times on the target sequence T when queried with L and R. The algorithm answers queries in constant time, and is written in Codon, a high-performance Python compiler.

By compiling an index of known repeats, we can query the index for sequences with frequencies that correlate with the coverage of a particular genomic experiment. Using the results of these queries, we can leverage consensus to build contigs, allowing us to assemble whole genomes. This work is pending publication.