Johnny Rasnic
Master’s Student in Applied Math @ UMass Amherst
Academics and Projects
Hi there! I am currently in my second year of the program. During my first year, I was a part of a year long group project on using linear programming, simulated annealing, and ant colony optimization to solve the binary capacity vehicle routing problem in the context of forestry operations in Scotland. I was the primary researcher and developer of the ant colony optimization algorithm used for our project. My collaborators were Abdulrahman Alenezi, William Howe, and Lindsay Knupp. Our project was overseen and advised by Dr. Yao Li. Our project paper and presentation are at the bottom of this page, and our Github Repo can be found here.
I also completed 2 final projects with a collaborator for the graduate applied math class sequence at UMass. Both projects were related to the Koopman operator’s theoretical properties and its application toward sparse regression and deep neural network approaches to predicting nonlinear dynamical systems. My collaborator for both projects, Su Yang, primarily handled the theoretical portion of the projects, while I primarily worked on the code implementation and application. Both projects centered on the Duffing Oscillator, a nonlinear dynamical system. For the first project, we simulated the Duffing Oscillator using the Spare Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) method. For the second project, we simulated the same system using a few Deep Koopman based neural networks. Both projects were overseen and advised by the instructor of both courses, Dr. Hongkun Zhang.
Lastly, in spring 2024, myself, Rose Porta, and Lindsay Knupp worked on a final project for Stat 630: Statistics for Data Science. Our project analyzed hospital costs across many hospitals using various quantitative and qualitative regression methods and variable selection systems. Our project GitHub can be found here.
Download links for presentations can be found at the bottom of this page.
Employment
I am also currently an intern at the Research Computing Facility in the Math and Stats department at UMass. This facility hosts a Beowulf style computing cluster available to faculty and grad students for research purposes. I help maintain and improve the cluster. At the facility, we also maintain a central server that hosts confidential staff files, and personal data for department members, including personal website data. Other duties of the internship include general Linux and Windows system administration and security for the department network and operations. I started this position in summer 2023, and intend to work until the end of spring 2024.
I also served as an elected interim membership organizer for the Graduate Employee Organization (GEO), the union that represents graduate workers at UMass. During my time, I worked with other elected and non-elected union staff members, elected bargaining committee members, and volunteers to organize towards a more powerful union. Concretely, I helped conduct a campus wide issues survey to gather data on the struggles of grad workers stemming from finances, discrimination, lack of access to housing and transportation, etc. I also helped organize tenants in University Village, the graduate family housing provided by UMass, where the monthly rent constitutes at least 75% of a 20 hour graduate worker contract. We met with tenants, organized rallies, and arranged a meeting with the Vice Chancellor of Finance (as of 2023), Andy Mangles. This resulted in some small wins for the tenants, including a promise from the administration not to raise the rent in AY 2023-2024, and a shift in the frequency of rent payments to make it more convenient for tenants.
Prospects
I am looking for work as a data scientist/analyst, or doing applied mathematics works of some kind.