Hello world, my name is Mikayla.

I enjoy solving real world problems using machine learning and AI.

I am currently a Machine Learning Researcher at Systems and Technology Research in Woburn, MA, where I work on a variety of applied research projects involving ML, deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. I received my Master of Science in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in January 2020, where I spent my time as a research assistant in the Computer Vision Laboratory advised by Subhransu Maji. I obtained my B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the University of West Florida, where I graduated Summa Cum Laude in spring 2017.

In my past lives, I've worked as a Machine Learning Research Intern in 2019 at Pinterest in San Francisco, working on the Visual Search Team, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory as a Summer Research Intern working in natural language processing in 2017.

Aside from being a real life Machine Learning Model (just kidding), I enjoy playing my flute, knitting, taking care of my cat, and going to rock concerts in pre-Covid times.

Work Experience

Machine Learning Researcher - Systems and Technology Research (January 2020-Present)

  • Working on applied research problems in machine/deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning for national security.
  • Primarily tools used include Python, PyTorch, Git, and UNIX.

Graduate Research Assistant - University of Massachusetts Amherst (Fall 2017-January 2020)

  • Researcher in the Computer Vision Laboratory, working on fine-grained recognition and vision + language. Read my Master's thesis here.
  • Presented Textures and Language research and gave a spotlight talk in the 2019 CVPR FGVC workshop in Long Beach, CA, and the New England Computer Vision Workshop at Harvard University in fall 2018.
  • Presented a poster and published a short paper on my Animal ID research in the 2018 CVPR FGVC and WiCV workshops in Salt Lake City, UT - check out the poster here.

Machine Learning Research Intern - Pinterest (Summer 2019)

  • Trained and evaluated new and existing computer vision models for fashion image retrieval and recommendation systems using image embeddings conditioned on specific attributes (color, pattern, fabric).
  • Implemented and deployed data pipeline for processing and visualizing new fashion datasets.
  • Utilized AWS EC2 P3 instances to efficiently train distributed deep models in the cloud.

Summer Research Intern - MIT Lincoln Laboratory (Summer 2017)

  • Researched NLP techniques to generate word embeddings on inherently multilingual data.
  • Designed a pipeline for preprocessing multilingual text corpora, training new embeddings, performing intrinsic evaluations, and visualizing embeddings with dimensionality reduction.

Wearable Device Security Research Assistant - University of West Florida (Fall 2016-Spring 2017)

  • Published findings in a peer-reviewed conference: Reichherzer, T., Timm, M., Earley, N., Reyes, N., & Kumar, V. (2017). Using machine learning techniques to track individuals & their fitness activities. In A. Bossard, G. Lee, & L. Miller (Eds.), Proceedings of 32nd International Conference on Computers and Their Applications, March, 20-22, 2017, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (pp. 119–124). Winona, MN, USA: ISCA.

Summer Undergraduate Research Scholar - University of West Florida (Summer 2016)

  • Published findings (first author) in a peer-reviewed conference: Timm, M., El-Sheikh, E. (2017). An Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Prediction of Shelter Animal Outcomes. In A. Bossard, G. Lee, & L. Miller (Eds.), Proceedings of 32nd International Conference on Computers and Their Applications, March, 20-22, 2017, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (pp. 119–124). Winona, MN, USA: ISCA.

REU Student Researcher - UMass Amherst (Summer 2015)

  • Awarded Best Student Project in Computer Science at 2016 UWF Student Scholars Symposium for project on identifying individual jaguars in camera trap images using computer vision.

Contact Info

Thank you for viewing my website! If you'd like to get in touch with me, please send me an email at mtimm100@gmail.com.

You can find me on LinkedIn here.