Projects

Things I've built and shipped.

A selection of technical projects spanning educational technology, scientific computing, and open-source infrastructure. For a full publication list, see my Google Scholar profile.

ROAR - Rapid Online Assessment of Reading

I lead engineering for ROAR, an academically licensed K-12 reading-assessment platform built at Stanford. It's deployed in 309 districts and 2,700+ schools, serving 160K+ students with 873K+ assessment runs. I built the engineering team and own the migration we're doing now (Firestore to PostgreSQL/CloudSQL) and the FERPA-aligned data governance underneath it.

EdTech Engineering Leadership Platform Migration FERPA & Youth Safety National Scale

Deep dive on ROAR →

pyAFQ: Automated Fiber Quantification

Open-source Python pipeline for automated tractography and white-matter analysis of diffusion MRI data.

Role: Core developer. Designed the analysis pipeline, implemented statistical methods, and built quality-controlled data resources.

Impact: Published in Nature Methods and Scientific Data. Used by neuroimaging labs worldwide.

Python Neuroimaging Open Source Data Science
Documentation GitHub Nature Methods

Cloudknot

A Python library that lets researchers run existing code on AWS Batch with minimal configuration. Eliminates the boilerplate of containerization, IAM setup, and job queue management.

Role: Creator and maintainer. Designed the API, implemented AWS integrations, and published at SciPy 2018.

Impact: Enabled researchers without cloud expertise to scale computations to hundreds of parallel jobs.

Python AWS Cloud Computing Open Source
Documentation GitHub SciPy Paper

Groupyr: Sparse Group Lasso

A scikit-learn-compatible Python library implementing the sparse group lasso for high-dimensional supervised learning with grouped features.

Role: Lead developer. Designed the API, implemented optimization algorithms, and published in JOSS.

Impact: Published in Journal of Open Source Software. Used for feature selection in neuroimaging studies (PLOS Computational Biology).

Python Machine Learning Statistics Open Source
GitHub JOSS PLOS CompBio

AFQ-Browser

A browser-based tool for interactive visualization and analysis of diffusion MRI tractometry data.

Role: Core developer. Built interactive web visualizations for white-matter tract profiles.

Impact: Published in Nature Communications. Enabled collaborative, reproducible analysis of neuroimaging data.

JavaScript Visualization Neuroimaging Open Source
GitHub Nature Comms

Selected Publications

Full list on Google Scholar or in my CV.

  • 2022 · Richie-Halford A, Cieslak M, Ai L, et al. An analysis-ready and quality controlled resource for pediatric brain white-matter research. Scientific Data. doi
  • 2021 · Kruper J, Yeatman JD, Richie-Halford A, et al. Evaluating the reliability of human brain white matter tractometry. Aperture Neuro. doi
  • 2021 · Richie-Halford A, Yeatman J, Simon N, Rokem A. Multidimensional analysis and detection of informative features in human brain white matter. PLOS Computational Biology. doi
  • 2021 · Cieslak M, et al. (incl. Richie-Halford A). QSIPrep: an integrative platform for preprocessing and reconstructing diffusion MRI data. Nature Methods. doi
  • 2020 · Richie-Halford A, Drut J, Bulgac A. Emergence of a pseudogap in the BCS-BEC crossover. Physical Review Letters. doi
  • 2018 · Richie-Halford A, Rokem A. Cloudknot: A Python Library to Run your Existing Code on AWS Batch. SciPy 2018. paper
  • 2018 · Yeatman JD, Richie-Halford A, Smith JK, Keshavan A, Rokem A. A browser-based tool for visualization and analysis of diffusion MRI data. Nature Communications. doi