Robert Obendorf

Robert Obendorf is currently in his 4^th year of study at the University of Florida majoring in Computer Engineering. In May of 2022 he will graduate with a Bachelor of Science from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. Robert is currently heavily involved with a student-run campus organization called Generational Relief in Prosthetics (GRiP). He has been a member since his sophomore year, became a director of marketing his junior year, continued with the position through his senior year, and was also elected captain of a research team his senior year. His roles in GRiP involve managing the club’s WordPress website, organizing team meetings, delegating tasks to team members, and teaching underclassmen technical skills that are needed to complete projects. 

During the summer of his senior year, he wrote an undergrad thesis on how user experience features affect impulsive buying in an e-commerce website. In addition, he started a company with his sister called RingMeRentals where he retrofitted old dial-up telephones to become recording devices that are now being used at weddings as digital guestbooks. He also designed, built, and manages the company’s Angular website. Previously, Robert interned at a tech startup when he was in high school where he quickly became a junior developer and eventually partnered with the company to develop an app that is currently on the verge of release. From these experiences, Robert has become proficient in Angular, React, and WordPress web development and has gained valuable experience working with engineering teams.  

Geoffrey “Austin” Simon

Geoffrey “Austin” Simon is a computer engineering student with a passion for human computer interaction. Austin’s interest in engineering dates all the way back to 2008, when he was tasked with building a website for his third-grade class. That passion for engineering and creating digital products has grown through his experience in college and work. 

While in college, Austin has had the opportunity to work on several notable projects. Sophomore year he led a team in designing and developing an application focused on promoting safe driving habits; this team effort gave him exposure to MongoDB, ExpressJS, ReactJS, and NodeJS. To improve his ReactJS skills, Austin then redesigned his service fraternity’s brother directory. To improve overall speed, security, and reliability, Austin converted a broken MySQL database of fifteen-thousand brothers to a flat JSON file. After fixing the fraternity’s brother directory, Austin applied his data manipulation skills towards his class machine learning project; for this project, University of Florida’s supercomputer was used to train and test a model that classified traffic signs. 

This past summer, Austin served as an information technology intern at Jabil Inc. in St. Petersburg, Florida. While with Jabil, Austin had the opportunity to collaborate across four time zones in three different continents. His primary project during internship was to design and develop cross-platform mobile app screens for an IoT device on-boarding using C# and Microsoft Xamarin.Forms. Additionally, Austin was exposed to the electronic manufacturing industry while working on a project that visualized over one million entries of manufacturing data from an AWS Athena DB using Microsoft Power BI and Python3 Pandas library. 

Katie Platt

Katie Platt is currently in her 4^th year of study at the University of Florida studying Computer Science. In December 2022, she will graduate with a minor in Digital Arts and Sciences from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida. Katie is a member of multiple student organizations including Women in Computer Science and Engineering (WiCSE) and the engineering sorority, Phi Sigma Rho. Katie is currently the Secretary of WiCSE where her responsibilities include maintaining the event calendar, composing the weekly newsletter, and coordinating with other officers to host events. Katie also serves as the Sister-at-Large and STEM Chair for her sorority, Phi Sigma Rho. As Sister-at-Large, Katie oversees mediating conflicts between fellow sisters and coordinating social events for members to attend. As STEM Chair, she organizes volunteer events that promote STEM to the local community.

Since December 2020, Katie has been working at the Florida Institute of Cybersecurity Research at the University of Florida as an Undergraduate Research Assistant. She is advised by Dr. Kevin Butler. Katie’s primary research has dealt with the classification of stalkerware, which are malicious applications often used in intimate partner violence situations that are downloaded onto a victim’s phone and track their location, messages, emails, etc. without their knowledge. Katie’s research aims to find the monetization schemes of identifies stalkerware applications to see how the developers are making a profit and to make gains in stopping their efforts.

Katie is also a Florida Bright Futures Scholar and was named to the President’s Honor Roll in Spring 2020. In addition, she was recently awarded the Gerald and Elaine L. Gibson Scholarship in Engineering.

Cameron Self

Cameron is currently a 5^th year student at the University of Florida seeking either full-time employment or internship opportunities for the summer of 2022. He holds a passionate interest in all forms of technology and is looking to use his skills to contribute to the quality of human life in his future professional career.  From VR application design to full-stack web development, he has experience in several different computer science fields, and is always looking for new opportunities to develop and learn different skills. Cameron also has a passion for art in any form, and has experience in many different modelling, animation, and digital audio software. He would love to use his skills to further enhance and advance art at some point in his career as well.  

Cameron has experience serving both as a team leader throughout multiple school projects, as well as in serving customer-facing roles as a liaison for meeting client needs. Throughout his professional experiences, he has shown his dedication to company loyalty, client satisfaction, and professional integrity – all of which earned him the Life Safety award at his time at Crime Prevention Security Systems. Additionally, he has consistently been appraised for his ability to quickly absorb and retain new information, especially in new and challenging environments. In his spare time, Cameron plays in a billiards league and enjoys tabletop games and music production.