About Olives
My name is Oliver. I am a PhD researcher working with Dr. Wayne Getz in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management department at UC Berkeley. I am interested in computational ecology and related projects. Specially, I am extremely passionate about enhancing accessibility through building software (primarily browser based) that can dynamically build computational models based on user specifications and modifications - without requiring users to have a rich background or expertise in computer programming. The majority of biologists, ecologists, and other applied researchers and educators find themselves needing tools that require significant knowledge in at least a few programming languages - which they often do not have. So I hope some of my work addresses these issues by helping bridge this knowledge gap.
Research
I love evolutionary models, evolutionary algorithms, and machine learning. Some of my interests include how to involve genetic algorithms with mate choice preferences based on genetic relatedness of individuals. Similarly, I have really enjoyed my recent work on opportunistic scavenging behavior - involving a mammalian carnivore opportunistically scavenging on either conspecific (same species) or interspecific (different species) carcasses. We examined the probability of monomorphic vs. polymorphic emergences etc. I have been working on developing the web-side (both client- and server-side - including HPC environments) of the Nova modeling software. This is a software that is used for dynamical systems, agent-based, and spatial modeling with a visual and scripting language.
Tools
I like Atom from Github as a text editor. I like LaTeX (but it is new for me). I like web-based / JavaScript data science and visualization (D3js, NodeJS, etc). I like open source. I like open access. I like progress.