My Passions and Personality

Hello! I'm glad you're here! My name is Venisa Sinha and I am currently a rising Computer Science student at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Here's a little about me:

Purpose

CS is powerful
Make an impact
Write code for social good
Create products that would make an average day easier
Turning any bizarre idea into a reality using any technology available

Loves

KPop
Singing and Dancing (not always in tune - see above)
Theater: Lead roles in 2 plays (Edna in Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets and in a VR film)
Making To-Do Lists
Growing my herbal/floral tea collection

SORF

Fall 2018 & Spring 2019

SORF is an Illini Union organization that helps fund RSO events on and off campus. During my time at SORF, I reengineered the front-end to incorporate a modernized UI/UX to increase visibility and understandability of SORF for over 1,800 clubs on campus using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and ASP.NET.

Old Website		New Website

Venisa has been an excellent web designer for SORF Board over the past year. I am continually impressed by Venisa's work ethic and her drive to push boundaries of this position to create a new website from scratch. Her desire to create to create has been informed by a need she has seen paired with the driver and determination to do something about it and build a website up to her personal standards.
From what I have seen, the new site will rival professional corporate websites in terms of functionality, design presentation, and ease of use for the front end consumer.
Beyond the design and coding aspects of her work, she has been an excellent team member, making herself available as needed for the Board.

- David Mizell, SORF Program Advisor

AARP

Summer 2018 & Fall 2018

Summer 2018

I worked with AARP Foundation to build an Alexa Skill which will make it easy, fast and fun for older adults to get reminders about community information and events, and to discover and deepen new relationships. The pilot will operate in five senior housing communities in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. (approximately 170 individuals).

I utilized Twilio's Programmable Voice to develop a complete voice-mail system which would allow users to call a number and record a message.The messages will be sent in a text file containing the mp3 URL of that recording to Amazon's S3 Bucket. Amazon's lambda function will then parse through the mp3 URLs and using Amazon's AudioPlayer Interface, Alexa will play back all announcement that are in the S3 Bucket.

Venisa's passion and energy combined with her technical aptitude and eagerness to learn will unlock so many doors. I can't wait to hear about all of her experiences!

- Miranda Kemp, Director, The Tech Nest at AARP

Fall 2018

I worked on revolutionizing telehealth by using Microsoft HoloLens to create an augmented reality (AR) experience. I deployed a prototype to showcase how telehealth and AR might be 5 - 10 years in the future. Some features in the skill included having a calendar view, for which each day will show the user's biometrics. Air-tapping on a day would show a detailed panel of their health information for that day.

Venisa is clearly a leader! She felt empowered to bring good ideas to the project and executed with a very skilled mind. I really enjoyed working with Venisa

- Michael Philips, Director, Technology Strategy Integration

GEMS Camp @ UIUC

Summer 2017

"This is for smart people," one high schooler mused as she struggled to understand recursion.
"No, listen. It's quite simple" I replied quickly as I explained how the recursion code for factorial works.
"Oh, wait! I understand this now!" She gleamed as she high fived her friend in excitement.

This was the most precious moment for me in the entire summer of 2017. My goal in this camp was to remove the stereotype of computer scientists coding in dark rooms at 4AM doing everything it takes to get their code working. While I have personally done that before, I wanted them to realize how computer science is embedded in unorthodox professions such as fashion, music, psychology, sports, etc. And that even if it were their parents who forced them into a CS camp, coding skills and a general understanding of CS can never be futile.

I also engaged them with various activities in Computer Science such as showing them how to program a Traffic Light Controller using C++ with an Arduino. The more advanced group dabbled with Three.JS where they started out by programming a rotating cube while eventually going off on their own where some programmed a flying bird, the entire solar system, or a one-player game involving monkeys. I assisted them with these projects and provided them with ideas to improve their simulation or game. Others were more inclined towards music so I introduced them to EarSketch where they used python to produce their own music with varying tempos, pitches and beat which they later showcased with great pride. Some students wanted their coding experience to be more visual so they used HTML and CSS to code up their own websites which could be about anything they wanted and the results ranged from websites being about their best friends to spotted lizards.

Travel

While the question, "where are you from?" is a straightforward question to most, it causes me take take deep breaths and answer with "it's complicated." By the time I was 16 I had lived in 4 countries: India, Switzerland, Singapore, and USA. Moving around this much definitely has its pros and cons but it is only now that I see all the pros that I had initially disregarded. But it is this exposure to different countries and multiple education systems that has made me adaptable and sensitive to innumerable fast-paced environments. I have indicated below the places I've seen and hope in future that this map will be flooded with more such red markers.