Marion Sudvarg

The Space Race

I designed this website as a highschool sophomore for the National History Day competition in 2007. It was the third place competing website in the state of Missouri. The website covers the nuances, both tragic and triumpant, of the space race between the USA and the USSR. It reveals some of the poorly publicized accidents, covers little-known correspondence between Kennedy and Khrushchev as they sought to establish join space programs, and frames the collaboration that took place between Nixon and Kosygin to undertake the Apollo-Soyuz test project. While the website's design and technology are outdated, its content remains relevant. I am working to update it to a reactive site, making sure that the information remains easily accessible to anybody who is interested in the history of space programs.

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Presidential Tweets

Machine Learning for Text Classification in MATLAB®

President Trump was well known in the public's eyes for being a prolific tweeter, with a distinctive style to his tweets. But how true is this statement? Compared to his predecessor, President Obama, can we say that Trump's style really is distinctive? Given a list of tweets from both presidents, we use machine learning techniques in MATLAB® to build predictive models that attribute the tweets to Obama or Trump.

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Therepong

A Two-Player Pong Game Controlled with Capacitive Displacement Sensors and Arduino

From the abstract: Here we describe a novel and entertaining way of using capacitive displacement sensors. Using similar methods to the creation of a theremin, we set up two sensor plates. Instead of using these to create and modify sound, however, we use them to control the position of two paddles in a version of the popular computer game "Pong." We add further controls to the game with a selector switch, push-button switch, and two potentiometer knobs.

This project was completed as part of an undergraduate physics Digital Electronics course. It involved circuit-design and programming in Arduino and Processing to create a motion-controlled video game. While the game has been dismantled, I provide the paper describing the process, relevant schematics, and all code.

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ADAPT

Antarctic Demonstrator for the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope

From the ADAPT collaboration website: ADAPT (the Antarctic Demonstrator for the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope) is a NASA suborbital mission planned for a high-altitude flight from Antarctic in 2025. ADAPT is a 0.5mx0.5m cross-section instrument consisting of a scintillating fiber-tracker, and imaging (CsI) calorimeter and silicon strip detector for gamma-ray and cosmic-ray measurements. The ADAPT instrument will demonstrate the major detector components for the larger space-based APT mission and will provide sensitivity to gamma-ray transients and a sky map in the MeV-GeV range during the ~30 day flight. ADAPT will also make cosmic-ray measurements during its flight, demonstrating the potential for a longer duration space experiment (APT) measure the elemental abundance of rare ultra-heavy cosmic-rays. Even during the brief flight, ADAPT is expected to provide prompt degree-scale localizations and polarization constraints on a few gamma-ray bursts, and provide better instantaneous sensitivity than existing instruments at energies below 100 MeV. The ADAPT instrument is being constructed by the APT collaboration including participants from Washington University (the PI institution), the Erlangen Centre for Astroparticle Physics, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Louisiana State University, the INFN Bari, the INFN Pisa, the Naval Research Lab, University of Hawaii, and the University of Minnesota.

My work with the ADAPT collaboration focuses on parallel algorithms and the supporting software systems for real-time localization of gamma-ray bursts, blazars, pulsars, and other transient, high-energy astrophysical phenomena. See my publications section for more details.

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Charts

Made with the Charts.js Library

President Trump is known for making numerous claims about the success of his economic policies, especially compared to the previous administration under President Obama. Using the Charts.js and Moment JavaScript libraries, as well as my own regression and seasonal adjustment scripts, I constructed several charts to explore some of these claims. The aim is to help quickly visualize available data, and demonstrate that these economic indicators tend to be driven by long-term trends, which do not show marked differences under the current administration.

As Sudvarg Digital Solutions, I provide consulting and data visualization services, providing expertise with such tools as Chart.js and MATLAB.

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Peace Economy Project

Website Upgrades and Fixes

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