As a digital privacy and security enthusiast, I find myself searching for more ways to minimize my digital footprint/fingerprint by self-hosting services and storing data on my own systems. In order to accomplish this, I have a small server rack with systems ranging from network appliances, to SBCs, to full- blown computer systems that are dedicated to keeping my data in my hands. Some of the technologies and services include Portainer, Docker, Pi-Hole, and OctoPrint.

My parents decided to renovate and remodel the house and tasked me with determining the networking equipment and setup needed to support their current and future needs. Their needs spanned from general internet connectivity to surveillance to IoT devices. I decided to use Ubiquiti's UniFi product line to ensure all the equipment works together, where I can set and forget, yet remotely manage and diagnose issues in the event they encounter any. To accomplish this, I planned around the new floor plans to determine the location of all of the equipment, optimal runs to make, and the technologies to incorporate.

I designed and created an entire website from scratch using only Visual Studio and W3Schools. Despite the many available templates on the internet that add pop to the website, I chose to challenge my abilities to make a website without any tools. The overall website design was inspired by the official Texas A&M University website.

As a privacy and security enthusiast, I seek knowledge that will improve my own life. Using a PoE IP-Camera, Raspberry Pi 3, and an Open-Source OS (MotionEyeOS), I have active surveillance in my apartment to monitor and record physical access. I plan to further expand this system with secure off-site backups and redundancies in the future.

I ran six fully configured, public game servers for the game Garry’s Mod from 2013-2017. I learned that modularity is essential in order to push updates and write game mods. If you didn’t structure it to be modular, it was a nightmare to keep up to date. These servers were hosted from my home 24/7, which taught me the fundamentals of networking. Alongside the servers was a community website that was a forums page and subpages that contained FAQs and rules pages for each server.

Project: Accident Analysis Algorithm

With the increasing frequency of drivers, the roads are becoming a more dangerous place, especially on unfamiliar routes. For that reason, our team decided to use the computational power of today to perform statistical analysis and machine learning to predict the severity of accidents prone to an area. We wanted to help reassure drivers by providing them with areas to be aware of without overwhelming them with raw data. The goal of this algorithm is to interpret historical accident data and predict the severity of accidents that may occur in the area based on the attributes that are heavily correlated. This information can be used to suggest avoiding areas during route planning and could allow the insurance company to make a preliminary estimate based on the accident location. Throughout this project, we utilized Google’s AutoML and Flask.