Nolan Platt

About Nolan Platt

I’m a rising senior at Virginia Tech studying Computer Science, with specific focus in machine learning research. I’m currently a Data Science Intern at Hitachi Vantara Federal in Reston, VA. GitHub: https://github.com/nolanplatt Website: https://nolanplatt.com Contact: n••••••••@vt.edu

Experience

1. Undergraduate Research Assistant

   Virginia Tech Department Of Computer Science

   Jan 2025 — Present · Blacksburg, VA, US

   Working on two separate research projects in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech - Contributing to the OpenDSA Project under Dr. Cliff Shaffer and a team of PhD candidates - Upgraded the Sphinx documentation engine to its latest version within a few months - Currently leading the effort to upgrade the project’s infrastructure from Ruby on Rails 6 to the latest version - OpenDSA is a nationally used platform for teaching Data Structures & Algorithms and is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)- The codebase is used by dozens of universities and maintained by the Virginia Tech CS Department - Conducting research under Dr. Nizamani on using Large Language Models (LLMs) for HCI usability evaluations - First-authoring a research paper on how LLMs can be used to identify usability flaws at the development level, exploring a potentially groundbreaking topic in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)- Presented original research at ACM CAPWIC, CHCI Symposium, VTURCS Symposium, and Dennis Dean Confernece.