Isaac Beh

Hi, my name is Isaac Beh. I'm an Australian student studying a Bachelors of Maths and a Bachelors of Science at the University of Queensland (UQ) set to graduate at the end of 2024. I'm majoring in statistics and physics, as I particularly like combinatorics, probability and quantum physics. I currently am also a tutor and lab assistant at UQ, helping with a variety of courses such as STAT2004 (Statistical Modelling & Analysis) and MATH2504 (Programming of Simulation, Analysis, & Learning Systems).

I spend a fair amount of time coding; both as a way to understand my main studies in greater depth, but also because I find computer science an interesting subject in its own right. In my down time I am probably reading (check out my Goodreads account below), though I do like to go hiking when I get the chance (particularly multi-day hikes).

A headshot profile of Isaac Beh

Things I've Done:

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UQCSbot

A discord bot for the UQ Computer Society (UQCS) that I help maintain, which helps with moderation, welcoming new users and general fun.

I've added quite a few features to what is known colloquially as "the bot". I first added a cog that detected haikus, with a procedure for guessing syllable counts based on a few linguistic rules, rather than using dictionary look ups. I've also added commands to find domino's pizza coupons (to help with event catering), to show the due dates of assessment for specified courses, to provide lists of past exam papers, and to manage which cogs are loaded on the fly (for debugging and updating reasons).

Additionally, I've helped with the overall maintainance of the bot, reviewing pull requests, fixing bugs, updating the documentation and occasionally assisting with the azure instance that runs the bot itself.

Recently, I've been reworking the commands relating to Advent of Code (a coding competition, which the bot tracks the leaderboard and helps award the winners prizes), which has involved a decent mix of interpretting external APIs and incorporating the data into the bot's internal MySQL databases through MySQLAlchemy.

Laser Beam Shaping via SLM at QBI

I set up and calibrated a new spatial light modulator (SLM) to shape IR laser beams at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI).

As part of UQ's winter research program, I set up and calibrated a new IR SLM under the supervision of Itia Favre-Bulle over a period of four weeks. An SLM is like a pixelated mirror which can be controlled via a computer, which I used to create arbitrary 3D shapes out of a laser. The video above is an example of such shaping, and shows the cross section of the laser beam as it changes in real time.

I then integrated this into the existing SPIM microscope at QBI for optogentic use, as shining concentrated 3D dots of light at specific neurons within samples (such as live zebrafish) can help determine brain activity levels from fluorescent tags in real time. I also wrote a MATLAB GUI application to integrate this into the existing workflow, that's currently still in use to assist Rebecca Lee with her study of activity within the lococus coeruleus of the zebrafish. Most of the software was built upon Isaac Lenton's Optics Toolbox for Structured Light Methods, which I also contributed to by improving the calibration methods.

For a (hopefully) approachable and non-technical overview of what I experienced check out my blog post and a bad apple demo video (both linked below). For those more technically inclined, a very brief technical summary: Initially I confirmed the reflected intensity profile and generated a lookup table for a new SLM, before beamwalking the SLM and telescopes within the SPIM microscope to focus on the stage. I then made a MATLAB library and GUI to create arbitrary 3D-positioned dots or shapes using either simple holographic gratings and lenses or the Gerchberg–Saxton algorithm.

Combinatorial Game Theory & The Fuzzy Consequences

A quick talk that I gave for the UQ Mathematics Student Society (UQ MSS).

After reading Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays by Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John H. Conway (yes, that Conway), and Richard K. Guy (yes, that Guy), I decided to give my first MSS Maths Talk on the subject. The 25-minute talk gave a brief overview on the construction of the surreal numbers via combinatorial game theory starting with the integers, rationals and reals.

It only covers the game of Hackenbush (and its variants), but still describes fuzzy numbers and ups and downs (which are similar to infinitesimals). I also briefly list other quirks of the surreal numbers such as temperature and atomic weight.

The slides were written in LaTeX with heavy use of tikz diagrams and beamer animations.

UQ Tutor

I have been a tutor and lab supervisor for quite a few undergraduate and master-level UQ courses.

This typically involves preparing and running tutorials for classes of roughly ten to twenty students. This also involves a bit of marking, so I can be a bit busy at the end of semester when I'm also juggling the courses I am taking.

  • 2024 Sem. 2:
    • STAT2004 (Mathematical Probability) Tutor
    • MATH2504 (Programming of Simulation, Analysis & Learning Systems) Tutor
    • STAT2201 (Analysis of Engineering & Scientific Data) Tutor
    • PHYS1171 (Physical Basis of Biological Systems) Super Tutor (i.e. Tutor Coordinator) and Lab Supervisor
  • 2024 Sem. 1:
    • STAT2003 (Mathematical Probability) Tutor
    • MATH1071 (Advanced Calculus & Linear Algebra I) Tutor
    • PHYS1171 (Physical Basis of Biological Systems) Lab Supervisor
  • 2023 Sem. 2:
    • STAT2004 (Statistical Modelling & Analysis) Tutor
    • MATH2504 (Programming of Simulation, Analysis & Learning Systems) Tutor
    • STAT2201 (Analysis of Engineering & Scientific Data) Tutor
    • PHYS1171 (Physical Basis of Biological Systems) Lab Supervisor
  • 2023 Sem. 1:
    • MATH7861 (Discrete Mathematics I; Masters) Tutor
    • STAT2201 (Analysis of Engineering & Scientific Data) Tutor
    • STAT1201 (Analysis of Scientific Data) Tutor
    • PHYS1171 (Physical Basis of Biological Systems) Lab Supervisor
  • 2022 Sem. 2:
    • MATH7861 (Discrete Mathematics I; Masters) Tutor
    • MATH1061 (Discrete Mathematics I) Tutor
    • PHYS1171 (Physical Basis of Biological Systems) Lab Supervisor
  • 2022 Sem. 1:
    • MATH1061 (Discrete Mathematics I) Tutor

    UQ MSS Secretary & President

    I am currently the secretary of the UQ Mathematics Student Society (UQ MSS).

    After being secretary in 2022 and president in 2023, I am now back to being secretary again for 2024. It'll be nice to step back a little but still be able to help out. I'm looking forward to continuing to help run events, such as our fortnightly student-run maths talks and our semesterly Lawn Bowls. These have all been so much fun to organise and it's been great to give a little back to the UQ maths community. For more information about MSS, checkout the website linked below (which I also help maintain).

    WiiWalk

    A desktop program that allows you to turn a Wii Balance Board into a controller to mimic your walking, turning and jumping in games.

    WiiWalk was a solo project I made under 40 hours in the UQCS 2022 Hackathon. It detects your real-life motion using the four weight sensors of the Wii Balance Board (originally an accessory for the game Wii Fit) which it tries to predict as walking, running, turning or jumping (or a combination). This prediction was the most fiddly part of the project and required a lot of experimentation. I learnt a lot about the importance of controller dead-zones and how to process signals with lots of noise without losing the larger patterns.

    After estimating the current action, WiiWalk then enters keystrokes which can be customised (editable by a roughly put together GUI) to work with many games such as Minecraft and Mario Kart Wii (run on an emulator). The motion is still a little jerky, but it is enough to complete some Minecraft parkour.

    WiiWalk won the Best Presentation award of the hackathon and was also the winner of the popular vote.

    CSS-Only Graphing Calculator

    A graphing calculator written entirely in CSS and HTML (no Javascript was used!).

    With a few shenanigans, it turns out you can make a fully working graphing calculator using just CSS. It involved quite a lot of chicanery, from hidden checkboxes, recursive variables and even some bit hacks. It's quite satisfying to see what can be accomplished with only CSS, even if these tricks shouldn't be used in production.

    This Website

    A lightweight website using only HTML and CSS (i.e. no javascript).

    All of this website runs without javascript. Designed from scratch, there is a bit of preprocessing done with SASS and Mustache along with a python build script to get everything together. Some cool features include TeX generation for the math in the blog pages and the pure CSS filters for this project list.

    If you're interested, you can read a little bit about my design decisions and the problems they caused here.

    UQCS Executive

    I was an executive on the UQ Computer Society (UQCS) committee in 2023.

    Despite never taking a CS course, I have been quite active within the UQ Computing Society, so I decided to help out in 2023. I helped organise and run the larger events such as the yearly Hackathon and Codejam. I've also been able to meet a bunch of people and greatly improve my self-taught coding style.

    The Existence and Uniqueness of Minimizing Harmonic Maps

    A talk I gave for the UQ Analysis Seminar Group in semester 2 of 2022.

    The UQ Analysis Seminar Group focuses on teaching new analysis concepts to upper undergraduate, honour and PHD students alongside professors. In semester 2 of 2022, the focus was on harmonic maps. My talk for the group consisted of introducing minimising harmonic maps (an element of a 1-2-Sobolev space that minimises the Dirichlet energy), proof of their existence in all dimensions and proof that all minimising harmonic maps with domain of dimension 2 are smooth.

      An Introduction to the Probabilistic Method — If Yes Then Maybe

      A quick fill-in talk that I gave for the UQ Mathematics Student Society (UQ MSS).

      A last-minute talk about what the probabilistic method is, and some example use cases. The main summary is that if you sample some space, and the probably of getting an object with some property is non-negative then thuch an object must exist (hence the subtitle "If Yes Then Maybe"). This is used throughout may discrete math fields (and occasionally in some more analytic fields), especially in graph theory, as it was one of the main tools of the legendary Paul Erdős.

      The talk itself was made in about 3 hours to fill in for someone who was sick (as any good MSS president would), so isn't the most polished. If I ever give the talk again (or write a blog post about it), I would replace the indepth proofs with a lighter overview, as not everyone followed along with those parts.

      Betcoin

      The Betcoin logo, with the slogan 'Crypto currency, Gambling; Good Separate; Better Together'

      A parody Ethereum-based cryptocurrency that can only be traded by betting.

      As part of a team of 3, I helped created Betcoin for the UQCS 2021 Hackathon. I worked primarily on the backend, using Solidity to create a smart contract "bookie" on the Ethereum Network (only test networks were used during the Hackathon). This allows decentralised Betcoin bets to be accepted, rejected and adjudicated by anyone.

      At the end of the 48 hours, noting that the team only consisted of first years, Betcoin won the Best Newcomers award.

      How to Hackathon

      A quick talk that I gave for UQCS (the UQ Computing Society) to provide some tips on how to get most out of a hackathon.

      Just before the UCS 2023 Hackathon (which I helped coordinate), I provided one of the two lightning talks at the "How to Hackathon" the day before. These were aimed at first and second years to provide some advice on how to get the most out of the event. I was invited as I had made some award-winning projects despite not having much formal coding experience (and because I was available). I also ran the streaming for the event, as the rest of the UQCS committee was quite busy with other Hackathon preperations.