Keren Collins

Experience

• 

  Swifts Creek P-12 School

  Mar 2023 - now

  VCE STEM Tutor

  I conduct tutoring sessions over Microsoft Teams for Specialist Mathematics, Mathematical Methods, Chemistry and Physics for students from a small, remote school in regional Victoria (my former school). My students study their VCE subjects either entirely online or with a cohort of down to two people.In this role, I have the opportunity to give my students personalised support drawn from my past experience of having gone through the same online schools myself, and I enjoy being able to put this experience to good use. I try to hone in on aspects of online schooling in VCE that are stressful, but may not be apparent to outsiders. For example, the perpetual uncertainty of how you are performing (relative to the VCE cohort), in a system where your final grade is a ranking. The lack of classmates to study with, bounce ideas off, who share the same interests or can at least understand your interests. The lack of a teacher you can catch just as class ends to ask a simple question. From this experience, I know it means something for me to just be someone who can sit down and work with the student on, say, the best problem solving technique for a certain problem. Someone to go through: this is an effective exam technique, this is a good revision technique, and by the way, you're doing great, keep at it! Someone to clarify that concept or go a little deeper than the curriculum, or tell them, actually this has real-world applications, I was doing this at uni last week, this is what I was using it for! Show less

• 

  Monash DeepNeuron

  Aug 2023 - now

  I lead a project team researching Neural Cellular Automata as a new computational technique for deep learning with computer vision applications.My primary goal in this role is to build skills and experience for my fellow team mates, and give them as much opportunity as possible to get the opportunities that they need to enhance their future career prospects. Unexpectedly I've found that keeping a people related goal like this helps me make effective use of the team member's unique skill sets and keep consistency with my dedication towards the team's end goal.My secondary goal is to keep this project progressing toward it's goal of developing a sophisticated understanding of Neural Cellular Automata. I am really excited about this, and a lot of work has gone into setting the stage for the next two to three years (and maybe more), accumulating the knowledge, tools and defined objectives for myself, team mates and future team mates, and figuring out how to juggle the workflow of the team against busy uni schedules yet still make progress. Show less During this period, I began working with Neural Cellular Automata team and spent a lot of time laying down the ground work for this project. This included building the original WebGPU code base for our showcase website (although the credit for getting the website onto the Web goes elsewhere). I also slowly eased into additional leadership responsibilities associated with leading a project team, with the intent of leading when the uni semester began. While I learned a lot during this time, I think it lulled me into a false sense of preparedness. When I became the project lead and suddenly I was the one responsible for communicating and organising, it was a lot more difficult and draining than I had expected, something which I am handling better as time goes on. Show less

  • Techinal Project Lead

    Feb 2024 - now

  • Assistant Project Lead

    Nov 2023 - Feb 2024

  • HPC New Recruit

    Aug 2023 - Nov 2023
• 

  School of Biological Sciences (Monash University)

  Jun 2024 - Jul 2024

  Winter Vacation Research Scholarship Program

  For this winter research scholarship, I was working on an automatic phenotyping app using deep learning image recognition. The app is to be deployed in BMS2042 (human genetics) this semester in Monash university next semester as a part of a fly phenotyping practical session. I really enjoyed optimising the deep learning algorithm, trouble shooting potential problems that could arise and helping curate the data set. We ended up trialling many different software solutions for the simplest and most streamlined methods for students to take photos under a dissection microscope, then helped figure out how to account to variations that we discovered between the available hardware (PCs and scopes).I also helped design survey questions to be put to the 600 student cohort to assess the efficacy and helpfulness of this AI tool and got to go through and fill sections of a Human Ethics Research application. Show less

• 

  School of Biological Sciences (Monash University)

  Feb 2025 - Feb 2025

  Research Officer

  I was ecstatic to be given this opportunity to continue to be involved in the VeriFly project! In this role, I acted as an independent coder for data gathered by the survey I helped develop previously as a part of the Winter Research Scholarship Program. It was really interesting to experience other people's interpretation of the same data when coming to a consensus on each response's meaning.