Michael Villarreal
tvillarr@vols.utk.edu
Hello! My name is Michael Villarreal. I am currently a 3rd-year PhD student
at the University of Tennessee (Go Vols!).
I began my PhD working under
Dr. Weizi Li
in the
Fluidic City Lab.
While at the Fluidic City lab, I researched the intersection of intelligent transportation systems
and machine learning by gaining insights into gradient-free adversarial training for autonomous driving,
training autonomous vehicles using reinforcement learning on pixel values, and analyzing the sustainability
and ecomobility of autonomous vehicles. Additionally, I helped conduct a user study to see if GPT-4 can
help novice researchers solve complex, hand-engineered mixed traffic control problems.
Currently, I am working under
Dr. Hector Santos
in his MARCI Lab where I am actively working on 2 projects. The first involves working with the Pat Summitt
clinic to aid in analysis of their collected Alzheimer's data and develop a machine learning pipeline for early
prediction of Alzheimer's Disease. The second project is working with Dr. DeLong at UTMC to develop
an automatic surgical drain classification system using advanced computer vision techniques. As part of
the second project, we will develop a surgical drain dataset, and we hope to deploy the drain classifier
to mobile devices for any doctor to use to improve their own workflow.