Taylor C. Nunes

I am a data-driven engineer who creates technical solutions to real world problems through software. I assess the fundamental principles behind problems to develop modular, scalable, and robust solutions through experimentation and iteration.

Education




Projects

Language Classification

Japanese and English classification based on letter frequency

Generative Art

A javascript program that generates art on a pixel by pixel basis using a random walk algorithm.




Research

Discovering new phyics using the principles of science and engineering

I spent 2 years working in the Yamanaka Lab at Osaka University working on the KOTO experiment. Here we use a high intensity proton beam to generate neutral Kaon and measure their decay. Since these kaons only exist for around half a nanosecond and we are trying to measure a decay that only exists one in 33 billionth of the time, it's necessary to have a fast, accurate, and robust measurement system.

Charged Particle Detector Development

The high enery proton beam produces not only neutral kaons, but also a variety of other particles whose signature can mimic kaons, necessitating accurate detection of incoming particles. I led the development of one such detector that was used for incoming charged particles. I was in charge of researching and testing the materials, creating a mechanical and electronic design, running small scale tests for feasability, directing a full scale development, writing backend data acquisition and frontend monitor software, testing, installation, and performance analysis and optimization. This consisted of lots of development in Python and C++ using the ROOT framework as well as work with data pipelines and storage in a linux environment. It also consisted of being a strong leader and collaborating in a team with many intelligent reasearchers. If you are interested please read my thesis.

Additional reasearch

In addition, I conducted research in developing algorithms to improve data analysis. I developed algorithms for event by event noise classification. I processed digital waveforms for separation of overlapping peaks.

Conferences

In addition to weekly presentations and giving colloquiums on different papers, I participated in the following conferences:

T. C. Nunes, "Analysis of Waveforms in the KOTO Experiment at J-PARC", presented at The Physical Society of Japan 2020 Autumn Meeting.

T. C. Nunes, "Design and Performance Evaluation of a Low-Mass In-Beam Charged Particle Detector for the KOTO Experiment at J-PARC", presented at The Physical Society of Japan 2021 Annual Meeting.