I stuttered till I was nine. During speech therapy, I was told that I was trying to get out too many things and that my words were tripping over each other. I needed to say what I wanted to in fewer words. Writing became an outlet for me. Being frugal with words helped fix my stutter and even affected my writing. I am drawn to frugal forms of expression: poetry, computer programs, and ASL. Whether it is poems or programs, I feel they can untangle mysteries and get us to a better place.

Poems help me make sense of the world around me. Connections, changes, and the undercurrents of time that fuel them interest me deeply. Of course, a reader’s own experience intertwines with and heightens some parts of the poem. In that sense, unlike prose, every reader's experience with a poem is like a fingerprint -- unique.

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There is an elegance to program design and computational thinking that is very reminiscent of poetry. Exploring how a complex problem can be iteratively (or recursively) reduced into simpler problems – almost like fractals – before collating their intermediate results into a solution for arbitrary problem sizes is very satisfying.

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I find that there are similarities across poetry and programming. Fueled by rewrites and continuous edits, each manifestation of the attempt is limited only by my expressive power. Like the proverbial flapping of the butterfly’s wings, small changes can have profound implications. A poem can meander or come unstuck. Similarly, differences in how I choose to express my program can substantially ramp up algorithmic complexity, making the problem intractable.

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How did I get to the point of embarking on a research project?

I started the journey of honing my computational thinking and programming skills while taking a few university and high-school courses: chronologically, (1) In the summer of 2020, I took an MIT EdX course on Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python. (2) As part of my AP Computer Science Principles (9th grade, Academic Year 2020-21) course, my project was to provide basic aggregation of COVID cases (stored in a file) that were made publicly available in my county (Larimer, CO), and (3) In summer 2021, I completed the sophomore course on Data Structures and Algorithms offered by the Computer Science department at Colorado State University.

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Finally, I find that each attempt – be it a poem or a program – is a time capsule encapsulating who I was and what I knew. Because I am both a published poet and a computer scientist whose software is distributed, I have put together a portfolio that reflects these interconnected aspects of whom I am.The first part is an abstract of my computing work and the second part is a few of my best poems.

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Public Release of the Dataset and Models

Public release of the dataset and models for ASL Wireframes and ASL Joint Angles:

Both models and the Jupyter notebook have been publicly released on GitHub and are available for download and adaptation at https://github.com/Dylan-pallickara. The wireframe dataset for ASL has now been published on Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/dylanpallickara129/asl-alphabet-joint-angles) and is available for download and experimentation. Perhaps others can design more sophisticated models, expand on this data.

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• Research in Computer-Assisted Recognition of American Sign Language [Start Here]
   

• Creative Writing - Poetry [Start Here]

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