CV

Education

Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 2026 (expected)
B.C.S. in Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 2021

Work Experience

Spring 2026: Instructor
- Employer: WatSPEED
- Duties: Delivered live and digital course content, facilitated technical orientation and Q&A sessions, moderated discussion forums, and ensured high student satisfaction
Winter 2025: Course Supporter
- Employer: WatSPEED
- Duties: Graded assessments and provided individualized feedback to learners
Fall 2022-Spring 2026: Teaching Assistant/Instructional Apprentice
- Employer: University of Waterloo
- Duties: Held office hours, answered student questions, and marked assignments for Computer Science courses
Summer 2022: Software Developer
- Employer: Magnet Forensics
- Duties: Improved cloud build stability, upgradeability, and scalability using infrastructure as code and Docker container management
Spring 2021: Software Developer
- Employer: Ubisoft
- Duties: Conducted R&D for a performance capture tool; developed, tested, and peer-reviewed code in C#.NET/XAML and Python
Spring 2020: Software Developer
- Employer: Oracle Corporation
- Duties: Designed and built features for new and legacy Java software and conducted unit testing using JUnit
Summer 2019: Software Tools & Infrastructure Developer
- Employer: Christie Digital Systems
- Duties: Re-architected engineering infrastructure into a distributed, parallel compute cluster and containerized builds for projectors
Fall 2018: Application Developer
- Employer: Sun Life Financial
- Duties: Automated server deployment, developed SQL Stored Procedures, and created C#.NET applications for monitoring and issue resolution
Winter 2018: Distributed Developer
- Employer: Sun Life Financial
- Duties: Maintained web-based applications using Visual Basic scripts and maintained databases using SQL, T-SQL, and VBA

Skills

Technical Skills

Languages: Python, C, C++, SQL, T-SQL, VBA, Visual Basic
Data & AI: Digital Image Processing, Ethics of Generative AI, Big Data
Infrastructure & DevOps: Infrastructure-as-Code, Docker, Container Management, Cloud Scalability, Parallel Compute Clusters, Server Deployment, Git/GitHub
Software Tools: Unity (Performance Capture), JUnit (Unit Testing), Profilers, Fuzzing, Penetration Testing

Design & UX Skills

Interaction Design: UX Research, Mobile & Web Design, Interdisciplinary Design, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
Design Ethics: Algorithmic Bias Assessment (Gender Bias in Media), Responsible AI Implementation

Academic & Instructional Skills

Instructional Design: Facilitating Technical Orientations, Curriculum Delivery, Adult Learning Support
Academic Leadership: Program Committee Service (ACM ISS 2025), Peer-Review, Research Dissemination
Public Engagement: Science Communication, Media Relations (CTV News, Radio)

Professional & Soft Skills

Communication: Technical Writing, Mentorship, Individualized Feedback, Discussion Moderation
Project Management: External Client Coordination, R&D Management, Team Peer-Review

Publications

Binned-KMeans: Extracting Memorable, Explainable, Weighted and Sorted Colour Palettes from Videos

Pocol, A., Istead, L., & Kaplan, C. (2025). "Binned-KMeans: Extracting Memorable, Explainable, Weighted and Sorted Colour Palettes from Videos". In: 2025 International Conference on Content-Based Multimedia Indexing (CBMI), pp. 1-5.

An Evaluation of Gender Bias in 167K Movie Posters

Song, Y., Pocol, A., & Istead, L. (2024). "An Evaluation of Gender Bias in 167K Movie Posters". In: Intelligent Systems and Applications, pp. 332-358.

Evaluating and Improving Disparity Maps Without Ground Truth

Pocol, A., Istead, L., & Kaplan, C. S. (2024). "Evaluating and Improving Disparity Maps Without Ground Truth". In: Arai, K. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Applications, pp. 153-177.

Interactive Colour Palette Generation from Videos

Pocol, A., & Istead, L. (2024). "Interactive Colour Palette Generation from Videos". In: SIGGRAPH 2024 Posters (SIGGRAPH 2024 Posters). ACM.

Seeing is No Longer Believing: A Survey on the State of Deepfakes, AI-Generated Humans, and Other Nonveridical Media

Pocol, A., Istead, L., Siu, S., Mokhtari, S., & Kodeiri, S. (2024). "Seeing is No Longer Believing: A Survey on the State of Deepfakes, AI-Generated Humans, and Other Nonveridical Media". In: Advances in Computer Graphics, pp. 427-440.

The Colour of Horror

Istead, L., Pocol, A., Siu, S., Chen, W., Zdanowicz, A., Rowaan, A., & Kaplan, C. S. (2022). "The Colour of Horror". In: ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production (CVMP).

A Simple, Stroke-Based Method for Gesture Drawing

Istead, L., Istead, J., Pocol, A., & Kaplan, C. S. (2022). "A Simple, Stroke-Based Method for Gesture Drawing". In: Computer Graphics International 2022. (Best Paper Award)

Assessing the Impact of Movie Plot Summaries on Box Office Sales

Pocol, A., & Istead, L. (2022). "Assessing the Impact of Movie Plot Summaries on Box Office Sales". In: 2022 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications (BigDataService), pp. 48-52.

Evaluating Gender Bias in Film Dialogue

Istead, L., Pocol, A., & Siu, S. (2022). "Evaluating Gender Bias in Film Dialogue". In: Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, pp. 403-410.

Generating Rough Stereoscopic 3D Line Drawings from 3D Images

Istead, L., Pocol, A., Kaplan, C. S., Watt, I., Lemoing, N., & Yang, A. (2021). "Generating Rough Stereoscopic 3D Line Drawings from 3D Images". In: Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2021.

Talks

Talk 2

February 19, 2026

Talk at Zoom, Online

Talk 1

January 23, 2026