Claudia Athens - Systems Integration Lead
Claudia is a senior in Computer Engineering from Clive, Iowa. In her roles, she is the point of contact for the client and advisor and she is in charge of making sure all the pieces of the project work together. Claudia currently serves as the Lead Peer Mentor for the ECSEL program, the Grace Hopper Chair for Digital Women, the Secretary of Eta Kappa Nu, the Computer Engineering Student Representative for the ECpE Curriculum Committee, and a member of the ECpE Student Advisory Council. She is currently in her third role at John Deere as a Part-Time Student with the Intelligent Solutions Group; she previously had two internships in product engineering, one at John Deere Dubuque Works and one at John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group. In her free time, she enjoys traveling, playing tennis, hiking, and obsessing over her two dogs.
Ben Simon - User Interaction Lead
Ben is a senior in computer engineering from Plymouth, MN. On our team he is the User Interaction Lead and will be in charge of developing the user experience for our birdwatching app. He is also in charge of organizing meetings with our client and advisor. Ben is currently the Scholars Chair for Tau Beta Pi: the engineering honor society at Iowa State. Previously, Ben has interned at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, IA and Entrust Datacard in Shakopee, MN. His knowledge areas are server development and systems integration. In his free time, Ben enjoys hiking, running, and cooking.
Francisco Arreola - Infrastructure Lead
Francisco is a senior in Computer Engineering from Cedar Falls, Iowa. He works on taking notes during meetings to ensure there is a record for decisions we make as a team. As Infrastructure lead, his job is to ensure that the data sent from the base stations is safely stored in the cloud, and makes on to the hands of the end users. Francisco is currently an active member of Eta Kappa Nu. He has recently completed his second internship at Google in Pittsburgh PA where he worked on the Datacenter Software team. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games, hanging out with friends, and reading academic papers on machine learning.
Pierce Adajar - Machine Learning Lead
Pierce is a senior in Computer Engineering from Sioux City, Iowa. His professional interests center around computer vision, machine learning, and open-source - this led him to taking on the roles of Machine Learning Lead and Repository Wrangler. He hopes that this will be a great opportunity to put principles into practice, as well as get some experience managing an “open-source” project. Last summer, Pierce led an intern research team at EnSoft Corp. in Ames, IA, and is excited to join KINZE as a software co-op in the spring. Currently, Pierce is a Teaching Assistant under Dr. Alexander Stoytchev, for CprE 281 and CprE 575. When he’s not working, Pierce enjoys tabletop gaming, video games, and dramatic theatre.