Will Dirkswager Computes Ethics

This site is designed to showcase my work throughout my college carrer. The Case Study page contains a case study on the ethics of software design I created. The Podcasts page contains a series of podcasts I created to discuss different case studies similar to the one I created, and the blog posts are my personal reflections on the case studies. These were created as part of the Computing Ethics and Society course I took at St. Olaf college, and reflect my learning throughout the course. The CV page contains an up to date version of my CV for more information about me and my experiences.

About Me

My name is Will Dirkswager. I’m a Computer Science and Physics student in the Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science and Physics departments at St. Olaf College. I’m earning my B.S in Physics and Computer Science, with an Engineering Studies concentration. I partake in the St. Olaf Percussion Ensemble, and played in the St. Olaf Philharmonia Orchestra.

Research

Most recently, I spent the summer at Kettering University in Flint, MI participating in an NSF REU on Autonomous Vehicles. My particular research was on developing a Privacy-Preserving Decentralized Federated Learning CNN based Misbehavior Detection technique for Vehicle to Everything (V2X) networks. In essense, I combined a novel way to train an AI model with an up-and-coming neural network design to eliminate the reliance on a central server and privacy concerns of existing V2X Misbehavior Detection techniques without sacrificing performance of the model.

Personal Life

In my free time, I enjoy playing drums, working on cars, taking pictures, birding, and going on hikes. I also enjoy learining everything there is to know about cars and computers, and I love to tinker with both, to improve my understanding of how they work, and because it is fun to have a device you had a hand in making how you want it.