Andrew Yao

Market Modeling Internship, May - June 2024

As a market modeling intern for the Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson, I forecasted the growth of the surgical hemostat and sealant industries through 2031 using recurrent neural networks and ARIMA models trained on quarterly sales data. To predict how much of the market J&J would capture, I modeled the growth of individual companies and their products (specifically, ABYRX's MONTAGE series).

From researching company products, I created two market reports and a spreadsheet of FDA-approved hemostats and sealants with their differentiating components.

Diagnostic Algorithm for Early-onset Alzheimer's and Frontotemporal Dementia, June - September 2023

Modern diagnostic techniques for Alzheimer's (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are expensive and invasive. To create an affordable alternative, I developed a diagnostic algorithm trained on continuous EEG recordings from AD and FTD patients. Using the Welch method to extract power spectral density features (a technique not traditionally used for AD/FTD research), the model achieved over 90% accuracy for all three classes, which was more accurate than existing literature.

This project was advised by Dr. Guillermo Goldsztein at Georgia Tech.

Write4Change Research Project, September 2022 - Present

Write4Change is an authoring community of youth writers led by Dr. Amy Stornaiuolo, an associate professor at Penn's Graduate School of Education. As a high schooler, I helped lead the rebranding of Write4Change, by creating a website and an online authoring and research community of over 200 writers on Discord.

As a member of the research team, I have coauthored a paper on adult-youth partnerships in digital writing (submitted to the Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy (JAAL) for review) and presented about the W4C community at the 2024 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference.

I have also presented an independent project about youth's perceptions of anonymity in online writing communities at the 2024 Philadelphia Writing Project's AI Conference and created a Discord bot that automates a verification process to protect from spammers.