Biography

My name is Eric Norbert Patrick Jeremy Hofesmann. I am from Nuernberg, Germany but moved to South Carolina with my family in 2000. I am currently a senior majoring in physics and computer science and minoring in mathematics at the College of Charleston. I will be graduating in May of 2017 with the prospects of joining a computer science PhD program studying machine learning.

I entered college with the intention of majoring in astrophysics, but that eventually got replaced with my computer science major. Nevertheless, I am still conducting astrophysics research. For three years, I have been working with Dr. John Hakkila to complete a catalog of BATSE gamma-ray burst pulses.

Additionally, from Fall of 2013 to the Spring of 2014, I was part of an astrophysics research group competing in the NASA sponsored National Student Solar Spectrograph Competition. The goal was to create an experiment centered around the suns light and conduct it with a self built spectrometer. After the three presentations given, our team won the best presentation award.

During the Summer of 2016, I worked as a research assistant with Dr. Brent Munsell using deep learning to fingerprint brain scans. My position included modeling and coding the deep learning environment and architecture that we used. Working off of Linux based machines, I used Keras with Theano as the backend to write both dense and convolutional neural networks.