Dennis Tomak

Computer science student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I build full-stack apps, data pipelines, and faster algorithms.

Experience

June–August 2024

Researcher

National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, IL

  • Optimized a fractal-dimension box-counting algorithm for 2-meter ArcticDEM heightmaps, replacing explicit 3D traversal with O(XY) computation by deriving vertical box counts directly from pixel elevation.
  • Applied the method to satellite-derived terrain data with about 25 million elevation samples per 10 km × 10 km region.
  • Measured a box-counting dimension of 2.061 for the Canada Region 057H test domain, which suggests an unusually smooth surface.
  • Presented findings and next steps at the Illini Union’s Research Symposium.
Grayscale elevation map of Canada Region 057H, with brighter pixels marking higher ground
Elevation map of the study region, Canada Region 057H. Brighter pixels are higher ground.
Log-log plot of box count against box size with a best-fit line of slope -2.061
Box count against box size on a log-log plot. The slope gives the box-counting dimension, 2.061.
3D surface approximated with 100 meter boxes100 m boxes
3D surface approximated with 500 meter boxes500 m boxes
3D surface approximated with 1200 meter boxes1200 m boxes
The same terrain approximated with larger and larger boxes. Comparing how the area changes with box size is what yields the dimension.
June 2020–August 2022

Photo Booth Administrator

I Love Photo Booth, Inc., Palatine, IL

  • Supported 1000+ clients at social and corporate events, keeping equipment reliable and customers happy.
  • Configured and managed legacy software to keep system components communicating reliably.

Projects

MySQL web application

Pick Your Processor

  • Co-developed a full-stack app for exploring billions of possible PC processor configurations.
  • Sped up critical client-side operations by 90% through column indexing and code refactoring.
  • Added IP address whitelisting to limit access to authorized network endpoints.
  • Python
  • MySQL
  • Django
  • Jinja
  • HTML
  • PHP
Mobile app, Agile team of 4

Receipt and Warranty Tracker

  • One of two backend developers; led PostgreSQL setup and built REST APIs for authenticated receipt, warranty, and user-data management.
  • Added AI-powered receipt processing with Tesseract.js and Google Gemini that extracts merchant, date, and purchase amount from uploaded images.
  • Secured accounts and API access with bcrypt password hashing, JWT authentication, and session management.
  • React Native
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • PostgreSQL
  • Gemini
Machine learning

Spotify Song Recommender

  • Built a content-based recommendation pipeline over 81,344 songs, using normalized audio-feature vectors and cosine-distance KNN to find similar tracks (0.988 average intra-result similarity).
  • Added genre-aware ranking that raised the genre match rate of results from 8% to 66% while holding average query-result similarity at 0.991.
  • Python
  • pandas
  • NumPy
  • scikit-learn

Skills

Languages
C, C++, C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, NoSQL, Bash, PowerShell
Frameworks
React, Node.js, Express.js, Django, Jinja, REST
Platforms
Linux, Unix, Windows, GCP, Firebase
Tools
Git, GDB

Education

2026–2027

MS in Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · GPA 3.88

2022–2026

BS in Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · GPA 3.92

Research poster titled Shifting Ice: An Analysis of Fractal Dimension in Arctic Surfaces, with sections on the introduction, purpose, method, results, conclusions, and future work