Natan Aklilu

Natan Aklilu is a junior majoring in Computer Science in Cornell's College of Engineering. While previously being a member of CU GeoData's Water team, he worked on both data cleaning and data visualization using QGIS software to meet the subteam's goals of monitoring harmful algal blooms (HAB). This promoted the initiative of creating predictive HAB models in order to prevent harm to local communities and beyond. As a current member of the Data team, he is developing a Generative AI component within the ongoing WAVES Data Preprocessing Pipeline project. He is using Python to incorporate existing OpenAI APIs into different aspects of the project. The project aims to make a positive contribution to the Data Science community by centralizing the tedious steps of dataset preprocessing into one package. Through his work, Natan plans to find new ways to apply his software engineering skills to help communities around the world.