Computing IRL Internships

Oxy Computer Science Department: Online social activities to build community
Students will explore existing platforms such as Slack, Discord, and social media to develop synchronous and asynchronous activities to support computer science students in building and maintaining their community. Students will research best practices about online community building, survey existing students about their preferences, then design and implement the resulting recommendations.

Oxy Sports: Data tracking and social media
Swimming and Diving: Track races where our athletes compete and identify trends from racing habits. Generate and analyze data for athletes to find “pace times” from the top 16 races from each event at DIII NCAAs. Use these benchmarks to identify a target time for each individual Oxy athlete.
Men’s Basketball: Help with social media and web presence. Use existing technology to film breakdown and highlight videos, and to improve targeted recruitment.

Oxy Student Success: A Virtual Oxy Quad
During normal times, just walking through the Quad on the way to class or to the cafeteria provided an opportunity to run into friends, faculty, and staff members where we could casually check-in to say hello or, if we had the time and inclination, we could find a bench or a grassy spot to engage in a deeper conversation. This project will work to develop a remote version of that community. For this project, students will design and develop a virtual Quad where community members can come to gather to be social and engage with one another. As a source of inspiration, think of Harry Potter's Marauder's Map or the students at UC Berkeley who built a Minecraft campus. We'd love for our community to have a space to gather and engage with one another--even in this strange remote world we all seem to be stuck in.

Oxy Fellowships Office: Social media and web design
The National and International Fellowships Office connects current Oxy students and alumni to external sources of funding that support a range of opportunities suitable for a wide variety of majors, personal goals, and professional interests. Each year, Oxy students apply to awards that fund study abroad, community service projects, graduate school study, research, language learning, teaching, and other experiences. This internship project will help Oxy students learn about the awards they can apply to by increasing the office's social media presence and making its website more user friendly. The goal is to increase the number of Oxy students who have heard of these awards and to make information about the awards as accessible as possible.

Oxy Institute for the Study of Los Angeles: Digital Humanities
Project 1: (NE)LA Stories. The final product of this continuing project is a Scalar interactive digital exhibit of interviews with members of the Northeast Los Angeles Community. Students will add content (audio and transcripts) to Phase 2 of our project. Besides the editing in Scalar, students would interface with community members who were interviewed (getting final corrections and releases, etc.). Also, as this is an ongoing project, we aim to streamline and document the entire process so that we can offer the project as a "toolkit" for faculty to integrate into their courses, potentially including a "backend" web interface.
Project 2: We recently worked with a community volunteer and the Autry on an index of Land Of Sunshine (later named Out West ), a magazine edited by Charles Lummis from about 1894-08. This magazine is a window into turn of the century Los Angeles and is an often used primary source. The magazine has been digitized with OCR and is available without copyright on Internet Archive, but the index provides much more detailed context and is often more useful than word searches. We were thinking a web portal which somehow integrates the index and the digitized magazine would be very useful to scholars and students doing research on Los Angeles.
Project 3: "Computational historiography". We have been working closely with Special Collections on digitizing the Northeast Los Angeles newspapers, a project done in conjunction with Highland Park Heritage Trust, Eagle Rock Valley Historical Society. Also, we have funded pilot projects in the digitization of The Joe and Henk Friezer Photography Negatives, who often did assignments for the Northeast Los Angeles papers. One of these pilot projects matched Negatives in the archive with their corresponding newspaper articles. Students will expand on this by highlighting specific events, the such as the 1968 walkouts in area high schools, and compare and contrast their coverage in the Northeast LA Papers using a data analysis.

Metropolitan Water District: Solar Cup
Students will help with setting up a rather complex Solar Cup website. In addition to building the site, students will learn how to perform 3D graphic work using the 3D graphics program Blender. Our site will allow the participants to build a 3D boat online and animate it. Students will also develop online quizzes, tutorials, and videos based on some existing materials. You do not need to have experience with Blender to apply for this internship, just a desire to learn about 3D model building, graphics and animation.

Law and Society: Campaign for judicial office: Data tracking and social media
In California, some judges are elected. Help with a campaign for a Los Angeles County judge. Work to. promote a local, progressive, female candidate who got more votes than Bernie Sanders in LA County in the March primary succeed in the November general election. You will gain experience with both social media and other modern IT issues and social issues such as criminal justice reform, climate change, women’s rights, racial issues, attempts to silent critical voices, and much more. Candidate Dellinger needs help authoring and posting social media posts, spreading word about her campaign via email lists and other ideas that the intern may have, and design and collect metrics to determine reach and effectiveness of messaging. Help make election history in California under brand new election laws while getting a highly accomplished candidate elected.

La Matematica, a publication of the Association for Women in Mathematics: Ethical review practices, reproducibility, and online tutorials
AWM is launching its first mathematical research journal in January 2022. The journal plans to enact ethical and efficient article review processes, provide online access to code, data, and other supplementary materials in support of reproducible research, and create online training for prospective reviewers. Students will research the current state of the art practices and make recommendations to the journal Editors in Chief, then help develop the materials.

STEAM:CODERS: Social media and online experience
STEAM:CODERS is a Pasadena-based non-profit that provides supplementary instruction to local public school students in the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) disciplines. They typically operate in person, but are in the process of moving their programs online because of the pandemic. This has broadened their scope beyond the greater LA area. Students will investigate these new opportuns, while also helping them extend their reach through social media and website recommendations. Students will also have the opportunity to train to become computer science tutors for elementary school students.

Operation Pizzicato: Technical side of entertainment research
Creatives in the entertainment industry rely on technology for a wide range of tasks, including research and digital production. Students will have the opportunity to contribute to documentaries, podcasts, live performances and book projects by learning about web scraping tools, doing research for book development, learning editing and footage acquisition in Adobe Premiere and After Effects, developing schematics for audiovisual performance project routing, working in podcast production from recording to delivery, and even doing political research and data analysis on tight state-level races.

Streetscope
Streetscope is a local early-stage startup that has invented a kinematic measure of traffic interaction and movement which we plan to use to improve the safety of traffic and transit systems. Streetscope uses computer vision techniques to analyze video streams from a local transit fleet and from street cameras in the same city. We are using these techniques to derive depth information from these two-dimensional streams of data. Our interns will use Streetscope software to analyze video streams and generate the geometric data we use to generate the kinematic measure. The software uses Visual Studio as an interface, an IDE that interns will learn to use to complete the work on their own computers using Streetscope’s network resources.

The Art Department
The Art Department creates immersive and site-specific public art installations in unexpected locations. During these socially distanced times, an upcoming project will explore questions of scale and technology to create a large-scale drawing visible from the air. Students will research existing and potential methods of translating artwork into computer drawings that can be transcribed into physical marks on the surface of a dry lake bed or other plot of land. The project may also include site research using online resources and maps.

Emerson Elementary School & Bitely Elementary School / Garvey School District: Distance learning, data support, and social media
The Garvey School District is located in a culturally diverse, socioeconomically disadvantaged, and rapidly changing community. The district serves approximately 5,000 students in Preschool through Eighth Grade in nine elementary and two intermediate schools. Garvey students come from the cities of Rosemead, San Gabriel, Monterey Park, and the unincorporated area of Los Angeles County known as South San Gabriel. Emerson Elementary and Bitely Elementary are seeking interns to research best practices and platforms for use during distance learning, to design online tools to collect data on students’ academic performance and social-emotional well-being, and to support communication with families and the community through the use of social media.