Introduction

John Azer

Following questions.Building understanding.

Notes on seeing

A photograph, clustered A photograph rendered as stipple, with the boundaries of 6 k-means color clusters drawn over it. c0 17% c1 17% c2 29% c3 13% c4 15% c5 9% 0 64 128 192 253 0 92 184 276 368 px
Fig. 1. A snow peak over pine, seen as six color clusters. k‑means on pixel color, no labels. It found the peak, the near ridge and the far one. It also split the sky along a line that isn't there. Nothing in the data says otherwise, so it has no way to catch that.

Computer science at the University of Florida. Machine learning, remote sensing, and the natural world.

Selected work

always a work in progress.

Tropical cyclone intensity from satellite imagery

Machine learning Remote sensing Full pipeline

A ResNet-18 fine-tuned on fifteen Atlantic storms, held out by storm and scored against HURDAT2 best track. Held-out MAE 9.00 kt.

StormBest trackPredictedError
Claudette35 kt35.1 kt+0.1 kt
Nicole35 kt47.4 kt+12.4 kt
Ian110 kt126.5 kt+16.5 kt
Ian125 kt92.0 kt−33.0 kt

On Ian, the only held-out storm that reached major strength, the model pulls toward the middle in both directions: +16.5 kt at a 110 kt fix on 27 Sep, then −33.0 kt at a 125 kt fix on 28 Sep 20:35Z. Grad-CAM attribution shows the model keying on the eyewall ring, but Cat 4–5 samples are rare next to tropical-storm samples, so the loss is happy to regress toward the middle. Ian is the only held-out major, so this is one storm.

Explore project
BAND

GOES-19 ABI C02 · Melissa AL132025 · 2025-10-26 21:30:21Z · not in training or held-out sets. Imagery, not a result.

LearnOrthodoxy

Retrieval Language models Full stack Deployed

A Q&A app over a corpus covering multiple volumes from Fr. Tadros Malaty. It only answers from what the text says, and says so when the text doesn't cover something.

The hard part was retrieval. With short or less detailed questions it pulled the wrong passages, or nothing useful, and the answer was only ever as good as what the model was handed. Most of the iteration went there, not into generation.

Explore project

What is the Jesus prayer?

The Jesus Prayer is a short and powerful invocation that expresses a believer's reliance on Jesus Christ for mercy and help. It is often articulated as "My Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner." This prayer is rooted in the experience of the believer calling upon the name of Jesus, similar to the cry of blind Bartimaeus in the Gospels.

Real answers from the deployed site.

St George Coptic Orthodox Church, Tampa

Web Content management

The church's public site: live streaming, podcasts, and a starting point for people new to Orthodoxy.

Built to outlive my involvement, the parts that change weekly are editable by people who don't write code, so nothing waits on me.

Explore project
St George Coptic Orthodox Church website homepage

About

I am a computer science student at the University of Florida, working toward the intersection of computer vision and Earth observation: satellite imagery, geospatial data, and models that estimate something physical from a picture.

Most of what I know about weather I learned from watching forecasts get verified. Away from the screen I hike, and I am unreasonably good at naming countries from a photograph.

Source
github.com/jazrs1
Résumé
PDF
Email
johnazer07@gmail.com