April Roszkowski

Me

Hi, I'm April. I study computer science, but I'm into applied mathematics and music (hence the link to my last.fm to the right). This website is both a little archive of my own to keep track of things and a portfolio aimed towards potential employers (if you're not a potential employer, apologies for the businessy "I'm selling myself" language found on some pages).

Currently, I'm a pursuing a masters degree at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I've found I really like the mathy side of computer science, hence my interest in computer graphics/visualization (and a bit of machine learning).

Anyways, welcome to my site; take a look around! The meat of this site is the project page.

Résumé

It kinda speaks for itself.

Identity

I feel stifled by professionalism—the only place it seems appropriate to discuss my identity as a queer person is here. It's annoying, because being trans and being bisexual is a really big part of me and has informed my personality and development immeasurably.

So, basically, I'm transgender (nonbinary, since I use any pronouns). It matters to me that you know since I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I can be fully open about it.

Interests

I play piano, listen to music, and do small coding projects in my free time. Music is what I spend the majority of time on, though. My music tastes are pretty varied, but the most common theme is that I love contemporary music and more experimental stuff. You can see what I've been listening to recently on my Last.fm account, found among my social links.

Research

As an undergrad, I was involved in quite a bit of research, mostly through REU programs. I've enjoyed all the work I've taken part in thus far, and research lets me learn a lot of specific and useful concepts. Sadly, it comes with the side effect that I've fallen hopelessly in love with LaTeX.

My first undergraduate position was as a research assistant to a UMN professor who does visualization research (the IV/Lab). My work specifically was an application which recreates traditional Micronesian seafaring techniques in VR. It was a fun concept which united some humanities fields with computation and was motivated by cultural heritage.

Most recently, I worked in a mathematics research lab studying optimal control theory and the problem of how to make many robots to move similarly. It's difficult to explain this clearly and briefly, so it may be more enlightening if you're curious to skim my final presentation for the REU: download as PDF or PowerPoint.