Hi, I'm Spencer Hayes-Laverdière

Projects

Music Genre Classification with a Neural Network

Myself and two others built and trained a neural network that could classify songs into 10 different genres. As part of the project we tested a baseline which was trained on the basic waveform amplitude of the audio file, and compared it to a model trained on 5 specifically chosen features. Our baseline saw a 2x improvement over randomly guessing the genre and our feature trained model saw a 6x improvement, with accuracy around 64% on average.

The neural network used was a multi-layer feed forward network that was built using Keras and TensorFlow. Data was pulled from the GTZAN dataset and was preprocessed into Excel using automated Python methods that we created. The entire project was written in a Jupyter Notebook . More information about it is available here.

Cooperative Autonomous System

The goal of this project was to have two autonomous vehicles - a land based robot and an air based drone - cooperate together autonomously to complete a task. The task chosen for our demonstration was garbage collection but the system could easily be adapted to other tasks such as cleaning up oil spills.

The system implemented a Mask R-CNN neural network that detected litter in images. The image processing and path planning was done in Python with OpenCV and NumPY. Most hardware components and sensors were programmed in C. The land based robot was powered by a Linux based RaspberryPi which also acted as an NGINX server for video streaming. You can learn more about this project here.

Work

SquareFeet.ai

Machine Learning Engineer · 2020 - Present · Montreal, QC

• Leading the development of pricing algorithms and models.
• Integrating scalable data processing and model training on big datasets.
• Training and deploying cloud models through AWS' SageMaker.
• Implementing mixed forms of machine learning (computer vision, tabular data, etc.)

University of Ottawa

Instructor · 2018 - 2020 · Ottawa, ON

• Taught enrichment courses in Electrical & Computer Engineering
• Led workshops teaching engineering skills such as coding and 3D printing to people of all ages
• Ran after-school workshops for at-risk youth at several community centres throughout Ottawa

Invista

Summer Engineering Student · Summer 2017 · Kingston, ON

• Learned about the manufacturing process of nylon 6,6 that is used in airbags, and about large scale manufacturing and logistics.
• Retrieved samples and performed inspections on product.
• Classified finished product by grade based on a detailed quality protocol.

Education

University of Ottawa

BASc Computer Engineering · 2016 - 2020 · Ottawa, ON

Minor in Business Management & Entrepreneurship.
Capstone: Land-robot and aerial drone co-operative autonomous system.