We feature Laurell Seville one of our 2020 Calico Challenge participants.
My name is Laurell Seville. I went to Ardenne High School in Jamaica and graduated with 9 CXC subjects. I currently attend the University of Technology Jamaica, majoring in Computer Science.
I began working with the Palisadoes foundation in June 2020. I became familiar with the organization through the Calico Program, an initiative meant to give students in Jamaica experience working on real world projects. I am currently working as a back-end developer for the API for the Talawa Mobile App. This application is meant to be a project management application for organizations such as churches and local businesses. I am currently working with another developer on the API which is implemented in graphql with Node js.
I am interested in a lot of areas but my main interest is AI specifically Machine Learning and how it can be used to benefit a small island nation such as jamaica. Machine Learning, though it has its downsides, can be used to increase the efficiency of operations and tasks, this can be especially useful when resources are scarce and money is hard to come by. Automation is one of the ways in which machine learning achieves this. Automation can be especially useful in the public sector where agencies and departments are often understaffed due to budget-cuts. s
I am currently focused on learning how to implement Machine Learning using Javascript, as this is the language I have the most experience with. Eventually my goal is to build a portfolio of full stack machine learning based projects which use javascript on the backend and a js based framework, react on the front-end. If all goes well I may even create mobile application versions of my projects using react native. My hope is that creating this portfolio will provide me with the experience needed to actually build something that can really impact the industry, both locally and globally.