Jessica Colnago

Teacher, Summer Immersion Program

Girls Who Code, IBM Classroom in NYC

July 2016 - August 2016

I was a teacher for the Summer Immersion Program in New York City, sponsored by IBM. In this program I taught basic CS concepts and some programming languages to 20 high school girls in order to introduce them to the world of CS and motivate them to pursue CS as their major in college.

Visiting International Research Student

Human Communication Technology (HCT) Lab, Vancouver, Canada

September 2014 - February 2015

At HCT I worked with wearable technology and participated on a project that focused on exploring the theory of proxemics applied to wearables. I performed research, built and tested prototypes using a web-based platform and RaspberryPi, and prepared a user study protocol for later use by the group.

Research Assistant

Advanced Interaction Laboratory (LIA), São Carlos, Brazil

August 2013 - August 2014

At LIA I worked on the Breakout project, a public space game with full-body interaction, and the Wishboard project, an interactive public space art installation, where I analyzed data and worked on papers with graduate students. I also worked on their wearable project, a series of design prototypes for mediating the interaction between user and a distant community, doing research, building prototypes using Arduino-based and RaspberryPi boards, and big screen web-based interfaces, as well as helped advise a bachelor thesis.

Intern

Embrapa Instrumentação, São Carlos, Brazil

April 2013 - July 2013

During my time at Embrapa I was assigned to work on the FACE Brasil system which was associated with a project to study the effects of climate change on agriculture. My work was related to the data collection side of the project and, as such, I developed the database for the FACE Brasil system. This involved the database design and implementation, development of user-friendly query tools and database management tools, as well as script development for data migration.

Intern, Intelligent User Interfaces

DFKI Projektbüro, Berlin, Germany

October 2012 - December 2012

At the Intelligent User Interfaces group I worked on several tasks associated with an existing web-technology based mobile multimodal platform and the prototype Android app Voice2Social. I improved their dialog manager (SCXML) responsible for receiving and fusing multimodal inputs; implemented the "Lift-to-Talk" functionality to trigger the speech recognition for voice commands; and, implemented additional features and optimized the "Sound Radar" functionality, which allowed users to query restaurants nearby based on sound related filters (e.g. music style). As a side project I implemented a speech synthesis component for the SATIN visual programming editor.

Intern, Quality and Usability Lab

Deutsche Telekom Innovative Labs, Berlin, Germany

July 2012 - September 2012

For my internship at the Q&U lab I was assigned to the "Smart Senior" project. I worked on the INSPIRE system, a Java based multimodal system for Smart Houses, for which I worked on the multimodality input fusion module, as well as implemented gesture and speech recognition, using Microsoft's Kinect and Google's Voice to Text API respectively. To test these functionalities I ran a small scale user usability study.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, São Carlos, Brazil

April 2011 - March 2012

I assisted Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Feuerstack, at the time a PhD student, on his project involving the use of state machines to ease the development of multimodal user interfaces. I developed a parser that read SCXML state machines and generated equivalent Ruby state machine, building upon the existing state_machine module for that programming language.

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