About Me

The name's Brandon Hoeksema. I graduated from Taylor University May of 2016 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a concentration in Intelligent Systems. The option to focus on artificial intelligence intrigued me from the start of my college career, but I had little idea how it worked. Toward the end of my first semester, the professor of our introductory computer science course, Dr. White, gave us a taste of artificial intelligence with a quick introduction of cluster analysis.

Cluster analysis basically just groups similar data points together which is nifty but ultimately not terribly satisfying. Though I didn't realize it at the time, I took what he taught us about clustering to implement something like k-nearest neighbors - an algorithm which can make predictions about previously unseen data based on a given dataset. I wanted to apply it to a Bible memorization tool I had wanted to build myself. The algorithm would essentially be used to predict how much of a passage I had forgotten.

Fortunately, toward the end of freshman year, I began an online course by Stanford on Machine Learning which provided much more suitable algorithms than my clunky little k-nearest neighbors imitation.

From there, I continued to look for courses online about machine learning. I did eventually apply a learning algorithm to my text memorization tool - MemorEquip. Then junior year, I finally determined to make a submission to a machine learning competition through Kaggle. I made some rookie mistakes on that competition, March Madness 2015, but greatly improved in 2016's competition.

For two semesters starting junior year and ending senior year, I, with the help of Dr. White, was able to do a research project and paper on an idea I had been toying around with for a while. This experience convinced me to at least apply to graduate school and see what happens. In the end, my top two schools rejected me. So whether or not I decide to go back to school someday, I wanted to demonstrate my ability in the field through this blog. Also, I want people to believe me when I tell them how I spend my free time.