About Me

My name is Elijah Sippel. I am a second-year undergraduate at UMass Amherst double-majoring in computer science and statistics. I’m most passionate about helping people and using what I know to build novel solutions to real-world problems.

UMass seal

Internships

University at Buffalo

Undergraduate Researcher — June 2023 - August 2023

For this undergraduate research internship, I worked on a capture-the-flag platform used in a software security course offered at UB. Students use the website to interact with all assignments for the course including homework, classwork, and exams.

My specific contributions were working on the backend infrastructure for students’ hacking sandboxes:

  1. Modify student Docker container configuration to support the aarch64 binaries in addition to native x86_64 (QEMU user space emulation).
  2. Implemented new tools to help instructors monitor and collect student activity data to ensure academic honesty.
  3. Update and adapt underlying software to prepare to eventually allow students to create their own challenges.

The main technologies I used for this project were Docker, Bash scripts, Python, and C.

RelationalAI

Software Engineering Intern — July 2022 - August 2022

At RAI, a database startup, I designed and developed a graphical tool for visualizing and interacting with data based on object role modeling. I implemented and deployed my tool to a company training site for new users of the company’s system.

I built the tool with TypeScript (JavaScript), React, and TailwindCSS on top of the existing Next.js infrastructure.

Brown University

Research Assistant — June 2021 - September 2021

In high school, I worked as an intern under a professor in the data science department. I worked on creating a preliminary version of “math authoring” software designed to allow math teachers to create visual and interactive content for their students.

The vision was to lower the barrier to minimize code use and increase access to visualization techniques that had previously had been restricted to teachers with programming ability.

I submitted a demo of this program (still available here!) to Grant Sanderson’s Summer of Math Exposition 2021 contest where we placed in the top 8% of 1300 entries.