About Me

My name is Kali McLennan, and I am a non-matriculated student in the CUNY Graduate Center. I am passionate about technology, science, and infrastructure. If you have questions about web development, Python programming, or want to discuss advanced research computing, clustered infrastructure services, or just about any topic please get in contact.

I am also a casual photographer with a penchant for Lo-Fi film cameras.

Professionally, I work at the Flatiron Institute, the in-house research arm of The Simons Foundation, a NYC based non-profit focused on advancing research in mathematics and basic science. I am a high performance computing engineer with specializations in parallel storage systems and high performance networking.

This is a link to my Tableau Public profile. It is mostly lab visualizations as part of the DATA 73000 course as well as the workbooks used for the portfolio entries below.

Portfolio

The following are links to blog posts created as part of the Data Visualization and Design course in Spring 2025 at the Graduate Center.

  • 311 Complaint Dataset and Congestion Control
    • Research Question:
      • Does the data collected by the New York City 311 complaint database provide any evidence that this program is having the intended effect of reducing the amount of traffic in the congestion relief zone?
    • Results:
      • The 311 data contains strong early indicators of the success of congestion pricing when using vehicle-related complaints as a proxy for the number of vehicles within the congestion relief zone. Complaints are down in nearly all vehicle related categories, with particularly decreased counts regarding obstructed sidewalks and bike lanes.
    • Data Source: NYC OpenData
    • Visualized in: Tableau Public
  • Walking Through Time and Space
    • As the second assignment in the course, this project analyzed my own data obtained from Apple HealthKit to investigate patterns in my walking between 2021 and early 2025.
    • Code:
      • I made use of Python3 with the Apple Health Parser from GitHub user alxdrcirilo to process and clean five years of health data obtained from various iPhone’s.
    • Research Question:
      • What patterns exist in my personal walking habits over the years of 2021-2025? How did my 2022 move from a suburban city to New York City impact my walking? Are there correlations with ambient temperature?
    • Results:
      • As expected, there is a clear and dramatic increase in my daily walking after my April 2022 move to New York City. This is partially explained by simply lacking a vehicle, though the effects of greater participation in social events and a desire to focus on my physical well-being are more significant.
    • Data Source: Apple HealthKit, NOAA Climate Data Online.
    • Visualized in: Tableau Public
  • Exploring and Visualizing Citibike Data from 2024
    • For the final project of the class I developed an interactive HTML and Javascript based exploration frontend for the 45,000,000+ rides recorded by Citibike in 2024. I also created a set of visualizations from this data to explore how riders choose between electric and classic bikes. My focus on this project was on the interactive map, with secondary focus on the Tableau visualizations necessary for the blog post.
    • Code (GitHub Repo):
      • I developed a data processing pipeline using Python3, Pandas, GeoPandas, and Multiprocessing to structure this data for interactive exploration via web browser.
      • This code optimizes the data structure for web presentation by creating JSON files to describe activity at each station for each month of 2024, producing a total of approximately 24,000 files.
      • A variety of post-processing scripts extract data to be used in Tableau to investigate behavioral differences between electric bike riders and their traditional bike peers.
    • In the future I plan to maintain this project and modify the data processing pipeline as well as the interactive map to ingest monthly data released by Citibike.
    • Data Source: Citibike NYC System Data
    • Visualized in: HTML/Javascript/Tableau Public

Interactive Tool: Citibike 2024 Data Exploration

Please visit https://citibike.rocketjetpack.site to explore the 2024 Citibike ridership dataset.

Professional Projects

I have been working on a fork of the node.js + next.js Slurm Node Dashboard which visualizes node and job level data in HPC clusters making use of the Slurm job scheduler and slurmrestd RESTful API. Visualization of node status including allocated and free resources, active jobs, and GPU utilization provides for intuitive monitoring for issues that affect resource availability.

Example Grafana Dashboard

I also make heavy use of Grafana to visualize time series data stored in a Prometheus database to enable administrators and users to monitor resources and identify anomalous behavior across jobs and compute resources.

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