John Daniel is a rising master's student in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

John Daniel is a rising master's student in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine.

Dedicated to product engineering, and research in the field of software design and education. Served as a Campus Representative during his undergraduate years.

Notable projects include work on a high-frequency peer-assessment application known as the Daily Smirk, and the first-place project BT-NasomEATR from the 2025 ICS Expo.

EXPERIENCE

2025 — Now

Research Assistant at Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine

TeamCAST visualizes progress and contributions in student team projects.

  • Developed an evaluation framework for quality, volume, and importance of artifacts produced.

  • Designed a PostgreSQL database to document artifact development over different groups.

  • Performed comparative analysis across multiple student groups to identify correlations among team participation, LLM usage, and other factors.

2024 — 2025

Research Assistant at Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, UC Irvine

Daily Smirk is a peer assessment tool for instructors in team-based course projects.

  • Designed and implemented a customizable peer assessment tool based on stakeholder feedback, streamlining data input and improving user experience for instructors.

  • UI, UX, and Front-end development using ReactJS for the Daily Smirk, a high-frequency peer assessment application under Professor Andre Van Der Hoek & Yu Lu, Department of Informatics at UCI.

  • Analyzed user flow and created entity-relationship diagrams to streamline data input and improve interface usability.

  • Deployed to 300+ students in capstone-project classes and other courses, facilitating high-frequency peer assessments and real-time feedback.

2022 — 2025

Campus Representative at UC Irvine

  • Led over fifty campus tours and guest check-in shifts, delivering exceptional guest service.

  • Engaged in student outreach at panels, events, and college fairs to promote UC Irvine.

  • Streamlined operations by automating and aggregating over 1,000 quarterly calls using Google Sheets and Python to analyze shift data

ACADEMIC WORK

2024 — 2024

Reader at UC Irvine

  • Assisted in grading for IN4MATX 121: Software Design I, under André van der Hoek, during Fall 2024.

2024 — 2024

Learning Assistant at UC Irvine

  • Assisted in office hours, review sessions, and in-person learning activities for I&C SCI 46: Data Structure Implementation and Analysis. Taught by Michael Shindler, during Fall 2024.

RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS

2025

Analysis of Work Produced by Software Design Teams within a Project-Tracking Application.

Presented at the 2025 UROP Symposium at UC Irvine

2024

The software development process of implementing a configurable dashboard within the Daily Smirk, a peer-evaluation app.

Presented at the 2024 UROP Symposium at UC Irvine

EXTRACURRICULARS

2024 — 2025

Design-a-thon Corporate Director
for Design at UC Irvine

Design-a-thon Corporate Director for Design at UC Irvine

2022 — 2025

Public Relations Committee Member
for ICS Student Council

Public Relations Committee Member for ICS Student Council

AWARDS

2025

Outstanding Contribution to Research by an ICS Undergraduate

2025

Designing and developing a clinical tool for speech language pathologists and researchers studying hypernasality.

2023

Redesigned UCI's student enrollment system, in a brand-consistent and student-focused way.

2022

Used Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Latent Semantic Analysis to improve user search over a provided dataset

Read more here.

2021

A game that calls on the Spotify and MusixMatch API to quiz you on your top songs and their lyrics.

Read more here.