Amelia Holcomb

About Me

I am a mathematician and computer scientist who is passionate about using her skills to fight climate change and biodiversity loss.

Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Srinivasan Keshav (CS) and David Coomes (Plant Sciences). My thesis is investigating the use of remote sensing and machine learning to understand carbon sequestration and regrowth patterns in degraded forest regions.

Prior to this, I was a software engineer in site reliability at Google. I worked on Bigtable, the Google database that backs Search, Maps, and other major products. I also hold an MMath degree from the University of Waterloo and a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University.

News & Events

The University of Waterloo published a Global Impact story on my master's thesis work. Check out the article here.

As part of ClimateAction.Tech, I helped to organize a TEDx conference on the role the tech industry can play in fighing climate change. The talk recordings are live here.

Papers

Depth-Assisted Segmentation for Forest Carbon Inventories

My thesis work won the Best Poster award at Mobisys 2021.

PQFabric: A Permissioned Blockchain
Secure from Both Classical and Quantum Attacks

How Computer Science Can Aid Forest Restoration

Modeling the Role of Networks and
Individual Differences in Inter-Group Violence

Projects

Secure Socket Layer Protocol

Basic implementation of Secure Socket Layer Protocol
on top of a TCP/IP server and client

Shift Scheduler

Algorithm that allows input of employee shift time preferences
and outputs a mutually acceptable assignment of shifts for all employees

Parallelized Sparse Matrix Multiplication

OpenMPI parallelization of sparse matrix multiplication
achieving up to 5.7x speedup with 8 processors over serial implementation

Bash Shell

Modified version of UNIX bash shell, including
piping, backgrounding, forking, file navigation, and signal handling

Diversity in STEM

I co-founded Iota, a group focusing on diversity in the Yale math department. In 2016, we conducted surveys and interviews of both students in the math major and those who had left it, and compiled our findings and recommendations into a 26-page report. The report was only shared internally with the Yale College Dean's Office and the Math Department, but email me if you're interested in learning more.

Check out articles in the Yale Daily News featuring interviews with me about diversity in CS, here and here.

If you're in NYC, please also check out the amazing BEAM program.

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