Sofia Visa

Biography

I focus on applied machine learning for solving real-world problems and on developing algorithms for classifying imbalanced data. I collaborate on bioinformatics projects with researchers from The Ohio State University and the University of Georgia. My main satisfaction comes from working with Wooster undergraduates on projects related to identifying genes that regulate size and shape in tomato fruit. Our collaborative research with over 28 undergraduates has resulted in thirteen published research articles.

Courses Taught

Scientific Computing
Computer Networking and Communication
Data Structures and Algorithms
Machine Learning
Computer Organization
Bioinformatics
Calculus for Social Sciences
First Year Seminar
Problem Seminar
Operating Systems
Database Systems

Selected Publications & Presentations

Hosler*, C. Akiri*, M. Ionescu, E. Van Der Knaap, S. Visa. On Designing and Implementing a Tomato Shape App for Android.In Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied Informatics Imagination, Creativity, Design, Development. Romania, May 2022.
Razifard, A. Ramos, A. L. Della Valle, C. Bodary*, E. Goetz*, E. J. Manser, X. Li, L. Zhang, S. Visa, D. Tieman, E. van der Knaap, A. L. Caicedo, ”Genomic evidence for complex domestication history of the cultivated tomato in Latin America”,Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2020.
Goetz*, C. Bodary*, A. Williams*, S. Visa. Detecting Structural Variants in Tomato Fruits Using Illumina Reads.In Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied Informatics Imagination, Creativity, Design, Development. Romania, May 2019.
Rial*, S. Visa.A Framework for Using Tesseract to Transcribing Early Modern Texts Having Non-standard Fonts. In Proceedings of the Midstates Conference for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science and Mathematics, Bowling Green State University, November 2015.
Wu, J. P. Clevenger, L. Sun, S. Visa, Y. Kamiya, Y. Jikumaru, J. Blakeslee and E. van der Knaap, The control of tomato fruit elongation orchestrated by sun, ovate and fs8.1 in a wild relative of tomato,Plant Science, pp. 95-104, DOI information: 10.1016/j.plantsci.2015.05.019, 2015.
E. Van der Knaap, J. Clevenger, J. Van Houten, M. Blackwood, G. Rodriguez, Y. Jikumaru, Y. Kamiya, M. Kusano, K. Saito, and S. Visa, “Network analyses reveal shifts in transcript profiles and metabolites that accompany the expression of SUN and an elongated tomato fruit” to appear in Plant Physiology, 2015.
S. Visa, C. Cao, B. McSpadden-Gardener, E. van der Knaap, Modeling Tomato Fruits into Nine Shape Categories using Elliptic Fourier Shape Modeling and Bayesian Classification of Contour Morphometric Data, Euphytica, June 2014.
M. Blackwood, S.Visa, E. van der Knaap. Finding regulatory motifs in the Solanum Lycopersicum genome, In Proceedings of the International Students Conference on Informatics – Imagination, Creativity, Design, Development Conference, Romania, 2013.
Book chapter: N. Jiang, S. Visa, S. Wu, E. van der Knaap, Rider Transposon Insertion and Phenotypic Change in Tomato. Plant Transposable Elements, Topics in Current Genetics. 24, Chapter 15, 297-312. 2013.
S. Visa, S. Strand, R.D. Pasteur, W. Morgan. Interdisciplinary Teaching and Research at a Liberal Arts College on Computational Biology, In Proceedings of The 16th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Special Track on Interdisciplinary Research, Education, and Communication, pages 196-201, Orlando, 2012.
S. Visa, A. Ralescu, M. Ionescu. A Framework for Segmentation using Edge Guided Image Clustering, International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering, Vol 2(1), 29-37. 2012.
S. Visa. The effect of class imbalance, complexity, size, and learning distribution on classifier performance, International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms Vol 3(3/4), 341-366. 2011.
J.Thomas, M.Lambert, B. Snyder, M. Janning, J. Haning, Y. Hu, M. Ahmad, S. Visa. Learning Morphological Data of Tomato Fruits, In Proceedings of the 23rd Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Cincinnati, OH, 2011.
S.Visa, B. Ramsay, A.Ralescu, E. van der Knaap. Confusion Matrix-based Feature Selection, In Proceedings of the 23rd Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Cincinnati, OH, 2011.
S.Visa. S.Strand, T.Vrolijk. Genomic Comparison of North American Strains of Histoplasma Capsulatum, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Computer and Communication Conference, Iasi, Romania, June 2011.
S.Visa. M.Ionescu, A. Ralescu. Edge Coincidence Based Technique for Image Segmentation, Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Computer and Communication Conference, Iasi, Romania, June 2011.
M.Rafferty, S.Visa. BitTorrent-Enhanced Distributed Internet Caching (BEDIC), Midstates Conference For Undergraduate Research in Computer Science and Mathematics, Wittenberg University, OH, November 2010.
A.Ralescu, S.Visa, S.Popovici. A Stochastic Treatment of Similarity, In Proceedings of the Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems Conference, Dortmund, Germany, July 2010.
S.Visa, A.Ralescu, Data-driven fuzzy sets for classification, International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, Volume 1, No. 1, pages 3-30, 2008.
A.Ralescu, S.Visa. On Filling-in Missing Attribute Values for Bayes and Fuzzy Classifiers, In Proceedings of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society Conference, New York, May 2008.
S.Visa, D.Guerra, S. Garcia. Detecting Atmospheric Buoyancy Waves in Lidar Data, In Proceedings of the 19th Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Cincinnati, OH, pages 62-69, April 2008.
M.Ionescu, S.Visa, A.Ralescu. Evaluation of the Similarity between Heterogeneous Data using a Fuzzy Sets based Approach, In Proceedings of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society Conference, San Diego, pages 463-466, June 2007.
A.Ralescu, S.Visa. Obtaining Fuzzy Sets from Data using the Mass Assignment Theory – Consistency with Interpolation, In Proceedings of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society Conference, San Diego, pages 436-440, June 2007.
S.Visa, A.Ralescu, M.Ionescu. Investigating Learning Methods for Binary Data, In Proceedings of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society Conference, San Diego, pages 441-444, June 2007.
S.Visa, A.Ralescu. On the Relation between Bayes and Fuzzy Classifiers, In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FuzzIEEE), Vancouver, Canada, pages 863- 868, July 2006.
S.Visa, A.Ralescu. Bayes Classifiers – a Particular Case of Fuzzy Classifiers, In Proceedings of the Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems Conference, Paris, France, July 2006.
S.Visa, A.Ralescu. Fuzzy Classifiers Versus Cost-Based Bayesian Classifiers, In Proceedings of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society Conference, Montreal, Canada, pages 302-305, June 2006.
S.Visa, A.Ralescu. Fuzzy Classifiers versus Cost-based Bayesian Classifiers – A Preliminary Study, In Proceedings of the Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Valparaiso, IN, pages 117-122, April 2006.

Independent Study Advising

Investing in our Future: Identifying Students Most in Need of Assistance. (Colin Gutow, Computer Science, 2022)
Comparing three approaches to webcrawling. (Salim Dohri, Computer Science, 2022)
On Implementing and Testing the RSA Algorithm. (Kien Le, Computer Science and Mathematics, 2022)
The Application of Machine Learning in Analyzing Organic Compounds from NMR Spectral Data. (Nicole Powell, Computer Science, 2021)
Building a College Roommate Recommender Web App. (Klever Gopar, Computer Science, 2021)
Statistical and Machine Learning Approaches to Depressive Disorders Among Adults in the United States: From Factor Discovery to Prediction Evaluation. (Minhwa Lee, Computer Science and Mathematics, 2021)
An Exploration of Real-Time Computer Graphics. (Morgan Thompson, Computer Science and Mathematics, 2021)
Sending Mixed Signals: Feature Extraction for Gendered Emotional Speech Classification and Modeling. (David Pfeffer, Computer Science, 2020)
Teaching Basic Python Programming Using the LEGO Mindstorms Robot. (Emily Skirl, Computer Science, 2020)
Yash Bajaj, Using Monte Carlo Simulations to Study the Effects of Subsidies on the Market-Share of Electric-Vehicles. (Yash Bajaj, Computer Science and Economics, 2020)
Artificial Intelligence with Reinforcement Learning in First Person Shooter Games (Zhirui Zhang, Computer Science and Math, 2018)
BioScript: A Web Application for Biological Researchers (Erik Barroso, 2018)
Connecting Five Stones: Artificial Intelligence Implementation for Go-moku in Unity (Jianqiu Bai, Computer Science and Math, 2018)
Sports Analytics with Computer Vision (Colby Jeffries, Computer Science and Math, 2018)
Pretending to Be Human: An Automated Tool to Writing Mathematical Proofs (Khoa Le Tue Nguyen, Computer Science and Math, 2018)
A Machine Learning Approach to Understanding Against Party-line Voting in Congress (John O’Neill, Computer Science and Political Science, 2017)
Building a Course Recommender System for The College of Wooster (Nan Jiang, Computer Science and Math, 2017)
Modeling Double Major Data and Predicting Organic Chemisty Grade at The College of Wooster (Yunjia Zeng, Computer Science and Math, 2017)
Evolving Monkeys into Sharks: An Analysis of Daily Fantasy Football Drafting Strategies (Conor Maley, Computer Science and Math, 2017)
Veni, Vidi, Didici: A Video Game for Learning Latin (William Rial, Computer Science and Classical Studies, 2016)
Needles and Haystack: A Computational Approach to Finding Subalgebras of the Symmetric Group (Peter Nelson, 2016)
An Exposition of Support Vector Machine Classification with a Purpose-Built GUI for Exploring Some Commonly Used Kernels (Dagmawi Zegeye, 2016)
Predicting Stock Market Directionality Using Twitter and Neural Networks (Tyler Catlin, 2016)
Bring Life to a Historical Drawing (Sue Reon Kim, 2016)
Are You Sure You’re in the Right Classroom? Researching the Lack of Women in Computer Science (Catherine Eckbold, 2016)
Robotic Navigation Using Image Analysis, (Jacob Priest, 2016)
On Designing and Implementing Graphical Interface for Mild Dementia and Early-Stage Alzheimer’s Patients (Michelle Blackwood, 2014)
Optimizing Merit Scholarhips for Enrollment Management at The College of Wooster (Tin Nguyen, Computer Science and Business Economics, 2014)
Don’t Get Boxed In: Connecting the Dots of Game Theory Through Computer Simulations (Trevor Pozderac, Computer Science and Math, 2014)
An Agent-based Model of Influenza Within a College Population (Matt Lambert, Math and Computer Science, 2013)
Optimizing Integer Arithmetic for Public Key Cryptography (Spencer Hall, Math and Computer Science, 2013)
Exploring the Capabilities of the Scribbler Robot for Introductory CS Classes (David Mar, 2010)
BitTorrent-Enhanced Distributed Internet Caching: Applying Peer-to-Peer Protocols to Enhance Performance and Scalability of Browser-Accessible Internet Resources (Max Rafferty,2010)
GraffiWii The Wiimote as a Text Entry Device (Joseph Henrich, 2009)
-A Django Implementation of a Stock Market Simulation Web Application (Yong Seok Lee’23)
-SocialMelody: A Human-Centered Social Media Web Application for Music Enthusiasts (Moe Ko’23)
-An Exploration of Operating System Algorithms for Optimizing Student Task Scheduling (Solomon Gebrekiros’23)

Professional Affiliations

Association for Computing Machinery

Awards & Honors

NSF Grant ($174,363 for College of Wooster) for “Robust organ patterning by OFPs, TRMs and SUNs in plant morphogenesis” (Co-pi in collaboration with E. van der Knaap and C. McGregor from Univ. of Georgia; and I. Goldman from Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison), 2020-2025.
NSF Grant ($396,970 for College of Wooster) for “Exploitation of genetic and epigenetic variation in the regulation of tomato fruit quality traits” (Co-pi in collaboration with E. van der Knaap), 2015-2019.
Mellon Grant for a Pedagogical Project ($9,700) for developing a Tesseract-based Optical Character Recognition System to Transcribing Early Modern Texts Having Non-standard Fonts, 2015-2016.
NSF Grant ($156,000 for College of Wooster) for “Discovery of Genes and Networks Regulating Tomato Fruit Morphology” (Co-pi in collaboration with E. van der Knaap, B. McSpadden Gardener, C. Catala), 2009- 2013.
Best Master of Science Thesis Award for 2002-2003, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Honors & Awards Ceremony, University of Cincinnati, 2003.
NATO Advance Studies Institute Grant for “Artificial Intelligence and Heuristic Methods for
Bioinformatics”, San Miniato, Italy, October 1-11, 2001.