Team Member Intros

Team lead: Dr. Anat Caspi

Anat Caspi is Director of The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (TCAT). This initiative housed by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington is focused on translating novel research and technologies for use by populations with disabilities. TCAT also plays a role in continuing the department’s well-established engagement with access technologies and in applying universal design practices across a vast array of projects. You can find more information about Anat on her TCAT bio page.

Team data scientist: Valentina Staneva

Valentina Staneva started as a data scientist at the eScience Institute in March, 2015. Prior to joining University of Washington, she was a PhD student at the Applied Mathematics & Statistics Department at Johns Hopkins University. Her research was with the Center for Imaging Science and was devoted to developing methods for tracking deforming objects in videos and statistical estimation of their dynamics. Valentina has a Bachelors degree in Mathematics from Concord University, and between her graduate and graduate studies she spent 1.5 years working at Los Alamos National Laboratory on problems in imaging, optimization and compressed sensing. She has broad interests in extracting information from different types of data, and building tools for it.

Team Members:

Rohan Aras

I’m an incoming senior at the UW studying Informatics (with the data science option); Community, Environment, and Planning; and Math. These major choices reflect two things: my enjoyment in playing around, analyzing, and visualizing data, as well as Urban Planning. Needless to say, I am pretty interested in this Urban Science thing. I’ve done some amount of ‘big data’ transit research in the past: see here and here. This paratransit project has been very interesting in making me learn about a part of the transit system that I haven’t really been aware of as an able-bodied person. In addition, it has been validating to be involved in something that will potentially have real impacts on our transit system.

Kristen Garofali

I’m a soon-to-be fourth year PhD student in the Department of Astronomy at UW. My reasearch interests center around objects known as high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs)–binary star systems that contain the compact remnant of a dead star cannabalizing its less evolved companion. I consider astronomy to be a great ‘‘gateway science,’’ so when I’m not searching space for the X-ray signatures of HMXBs (a.k.a. staring at the pixels on my computer screen) I volunteer with UW’s Mobile Planetarium as a presenter and act as co-organizer and presenter for Astronomy on Tap Seattle.

Being involved with the Paratransit Group as a part of the Data Science for Social Good summer program has been a unique opportunity for me to work on a project that is decidedly more grounded (bad astronomy pun intended). Not only is this project helping me hone the skills that every data scientist should have in her toolkit, but it has also afforded me the opportunity to work with and learn from a team of people with a truly diverse set of expertise and experiences. All of this is just icing on the (heavily iced) cake, however. The cake, in a not at all apt analogy, is the chance to potentially positively impact public transit for all of King County via cost savings to the Access paratransit system.

Kivan Polimis

This summer, I’m enjoying working with our team and building a solution to improve King County’s Access Paratransit Service. Our project has really pushed us to understand our data’s strengths and limitations and how we can best analyze routing and costs related to service. Our team and the broader eScience community have been great resources for learning approaches, software and workflows for tackling data-driven problems. I’m a graduate student at UW with research interests in health development, residential mobility and urban demography.

Frank Fineis

'’I’m just excited to be here’’ - my tagline. I’m a Master’s student at UW in applied mathematics, and I’m big into this growing ‘‘data science’’ scene. I’m from the Chicagoland area, and I will be moving back in August! It’s been a nice 18 months or so in Seattle, and my time at the eScience Institute has been formative, to say the least. Machine learning, data science, buzzwords galore, I’m trying to learn more and more every day, moving from the classroom to applied, industry-relevant data science.

Working with the gobs of historical Access rider data has been a little bit different than working with the clean, organized toy-example data I’m used to from grad school, but it has been a fun learning new tools to handle the data we’ve got. I am a big fan of doing a thorough literature review before tackling any new problem, and while there is a ton of relevant research out there, this problem is ever-so-subtly different than the wide body of paratransit solutions that we’ve been able locate.

Why I love working on the paratransit problem: we have an opportunity to build something from scratch that can potentially efficiently eliminate a considerable source of risk from King County’s paratransit operations!

Emily Andrulis

As the only one on the team not officially associated with UW, I’ve really enjoyed spending my summer here in Seattle, but I do look forward to going back to my home institution, Cornell College, in Mount Vernon, Iowa at the end of the summer. I’m a rising senior, about to finish my undergraduate degree with a B.S. in Computer Science, and so tackling a Big Data project like ours has been incredibly informative and exciting for me.

I thoroughly enjoy working in our collaborative, interdisciplinary team environment, and I feel like I have learned a lot this summer from my different team mates and the unique perspectives they bring to the project. Our topic of working to improve the paratransit system for King County has been fun for me because I know our work can make a real difference for all the bus riders in King County. Also, I love delving into all the complexities that are involved in working with their system, and trying to analyze and learn more about how it works.