My name is Matthew Andris Stagitis and I was born on June 10, 1991. I was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware along with my two older sisters, Jennifer and Kimberly. At an extremely early age, my parents, Andy and Sue, got me involved in numerous local sports leagues. Although I enjoyed nearly all of the different activities, basketball became my true love. I continued to play basketball throughout my grade school days and into my high school years at the Charter School of Wilmington. While I did enjoy athletics, my decision to attend the Charter School of Wilmington was based solely on their academic status, being that at that time the institution was ranked among the top fifty high schools in the country. It was at Charter that I discovered my interest in computer science. As a matter of fact, this interest caused for me to take nearly all of the computer science courses offered! I graduated from the Charter School of Wilmington in May 2009 along with a large group of my best friends. My successes on the court and in the classroom, however, did not end there.

As a youngster, I was aware that many of my family members, including my two older sisters, were either graduates of or enrolled at the University of Delaware. I quickly fell in love with the university as well and was fortunate enough to be accepted as a member of the class of 2013. While studying on campus, I furthered my computer science interests by accepting the field as my major. I continue to research and learn about computer science, specifically in the concentration of natural language processing. Apart from my studies, I am involved in a couple of significant organizations on campus. Since my freshman year, I have been a proud member of the University of Delaware men's club basketball team. By my sophomore year I was actually made the team's social chair, which required for me to set up social events and arrange fundraising activities. In the spring semester of 2011, I pledged the Sigma Pi Fraternity with some of my closest friends. Needless to say, a few close friends ended up turning into approximately one hundred closest friends. I am eager to enjoy the rest of my time here at the University of Delaware, after which I hope to enroll in a graduate program at a prestigious academy.

After graduating from the Charter School of Wilmington in the spring of 2009, I enrolled at the University of Delaware . Immediately after I was accepted into the university, I chose computer science as my major. Now that I am about to enter my senior year, I have begun focusing more on the natural language processing portion of the computer science field while still taking core major courses. Throughout all of my semesters, I have managed to keep a cumulative overall grade point average of 3.769 with a cumulative major grade point average of 3.924. I have made the Dean's List every semester that I have been a student at the University of Delaware, and I have hopes of keeping this trend going until I graduate. The following are just a couple of notable courses that I have taken:

• Data Structures
• Computer Architecture
• Machine Assembly and Organization
• Introduction to Digital Systems
• Data Mining
• Database Systems
• Algorithms

After I have completed my undergraduate work at the University of Delaware, I plan to attend graduate school in order to further my knowledge of natural language processing.

As a result of my performance in the classroom, I was employed by the University of Delaware's computer science department during my sophomore year. I have been working in a natural language processing laboratory with Professor Sandra Carberry, Professor Kathleen McCoy , and a handful of graduate students for almost two years now. In the laboratory, we are mainly focused with the retrieval of information graphics, which are commonly in the form of a line graph or bar chart. Our overall goal is to handle user-written queries that desire such graphics and to efficiently and accurately return appropriate graphic results. In order to bring us closer to our ultimate goal, I have spearheaded multiple different subprojects, mainly used for collecting relevant data.

Before the summer of 2011, I was accepted into the 2011 Science and Engineering Summer Scholars Program for my work in the laboratory, which led me to managing my first project. This project involved a human subject experiment where large numbers of students were asked to come to the laboratory. Each of these students were then given a set of information graphics and asked to write a query that would expect the shown graphic as a result. This experiment generated hundreds of queries, which may be seen in full with their information graphics here . After the results were collected, I spoke on behalf of my findings at the program's poster symposium.

When school resumed in fall 2011, I began examining my results with the WEKA open source machine learning software. This software allowed me to identify patterns or signs in the data that could be helpful in extracting relevant or particularly useful information from the queries.

I later led a second human subjects experiment in order to expand on the already existing data. Much like the prior experiment, students were asked to generate queries while viewing unique information graphics. In this trial, however, students were given four similar information graphics at a time and asked to write a query for each that would satisfy only the one graphic but not the others. Again, the results of the experiment along with the graphics used can be found here.

Currently, I am working on a project with PhD. student Ivanka Li that involves identifying key attributes in the collected queries. These key attributes help to extract phrases from the queries that are then placed as the resulting information graphic's dependent axis, independent axis, title, or caption text. We are currently working on developing a system in which this entire process may be done automatically by a machine.

While continuing to work within the aforementioned subproject, I will also begin writing my senior thesis next semester under Professor Carberry. The thesis project will deal with the uses of machine learning in the retrieval of graphs from a digital library. More specifically, I will be using machine learning to hypothesize important characteristics of the desired graph based on features obtained from a full sentence query. The features themselves will be extracted from the query by Ivanka Li.

My resume may be viewed and downloaded in portable document format here .

If you have any questions regarding any of this information, please feel free to contact me using either the email or phone number found below.

Please feel free to contact me using any one of the following:

Phone: (302) 668 - 6818

Primary Email: mattstag at udel dot edu

Secondary Email: stagitis at cis dot udel dot edu