Alec Jackson

Experience Showcase: Open Source - Kernel

Background

I'm trying to get more involved in the open source work. I have a long history of working with open source and modifying it for personal reasons. Until recently none of the work I did were things I thought would be useful to the community. However, recently there's a few things I've worked on that I've recently could be bennefical to the community. As of writing I'm in the process of upstreaming these patches and features to the Linux Kernel.

Patch 1: Pericom I2C GPIO Expander Driver

Pericom has a serious of I2C expanders. Recently I had the opportunity to write a driver for this because it was on a board and there did not seem to already be a driver available. It's a 16 pin IO expander and the driver integrates it into the Linux GPIO subsystem just as any other GPIO device would.

Patch 2: Build integration of Driver

To keep logical seperation and the potential of the previous patch going out of date this is the patch of the driver into the build and conf system.

Patch 3: PWM Driver Bug Fix in Vendor Driver

When working with the PWM system on an Exynos chip I found an issue with the vendor driver. There was vaiable overflow when going to a 100% duty cycle. This issue seemed to have been around for the entire history of the driver.

Project Showcase: Pong

Background

This project is a recreation of Atari pong built using OpenGL. I didn't spend too much time worrying about recreating the game perfectly, but was more interested in using the basic idea as a project to learn OpenGL and a windowing toolkit. The project was made using the C++ implementation of OpenGL.

Technical Details

The OpenGL details are just as simple as the project looks, each square is made up of two triangles meaning the entire project consists of 6 triangles. There is an effect written into the shaders that makes every other line transparent to give it a classic scanline look. The project uses SDL as a windowing system, which simplifies cross platform support. SDL was chosen over other multi-platform windowing toolkits because it provides support for audio and native joystick support which reduced the number of libaries the project relied on.

Future Work

There are several active plans for this project. Firstly, I am looking into porting this to webGL and exploring the possiblity of hosting playable version here. Another thing I'm exploring is the possiblity of adding networking to allow online multiplayer support.

Experience Showcase: Coursework - Natural Language Processing

Background

Natural Language Processing is a field of computing that deals with processing Language in the form of how human speak. Think Siri or Amazon Alexa, that's the idea behind Natural Lanuage Processing. The image is from a project to create wordclouds. A more in depth explanation of the process is available here.

Projects

The projects for this class were heavily based in machine learning algorithms. This is something that is at the core of Natural Language Processing. Most approaches to creating Natural Language models involving training a model with a dataset. One such project used a dataset of spam emails, the goal was to train the model with the spam set and then test the model with a testing set. This project used one of the more straight forward models, known as an n-gram model which trains the model by using n number of preceeding words.

Technical Details

This class covered many of the introductory topics in Natural language processing using Python and NLTK(Natural Lanuage ToolKit). From N-gram models, to Markov chains, and TF/IDF scores. The course concluded with an opened ended project to which I decided to write a proof of concept article recommendation system. Pratical results were mixed, but provided intriguing results.

Senior Project: NetBSD Kernel API

Background

The NetBSD is one of the 3 major forks of the original BSD, alongside FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I'm working with a small team of seniors to add new kernel and userland functionality to NetBSD.

What we're doing

The project consists of several different sections. The core of the project is the kernel API we're developing. This API is going to enable the features ability to interact with real time clocks on systems that support booting from the clock. Alongside the API we're expanding the NetBSD clock driver to allow for the new functionality. Additionally, to allow system programs and users to directly use the feature we're creating a syscall and modifying the userland program halt to take additional flags.

Technical Details

To be consistent with the NetBSD enviroment we are going to continue using their programming standards. This means all programs will be written in C and syscalls and halt modifications will be properly documented in manpage format.