Besley’s Lab

Projects & lab work

Selected data science, machine learning, and full-stack work — plus the experiments that keep the lab fun. Code lives on GitHub.

EpsTracked — document analysis dashboard

Spring 2026 · CS/QTM/LING 329

Full-stack NLP application for exploring events and entities extracted from the publicly released Epstein document corpus. A Python pipeline classified 2,599 events across 787 document threads and surfaced 515 unique entities; a React/TypeScript multi-view dashboard makes the corpus searchable.

  • Python
  • Transformers
  • NLP
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Vercel

Live app

NYC Airbnb price prediction

Spring 2026 · QTM 347

Price model over 48,000+ NYC listings combining structured features with NLP signals mined from listing names (luxury keywords, capitalization ratio, word statistics). Benchmarked OLS, Ridge, LASSO, and Random Forest; the text features added real signal beyond location and room type.

  • Python
  • scikit-learn
  • pandas
  • Feature engineering

Hunger Games simulator

Ongoing lab experiment

A deterministic, trait-driven arena simulation: procedural biome terrain, weather systems, alliances and betrayals, and a narrative event feed. Started life as a Python prototype; now a TypeScript engine you can play right here — bring your own roster.

  • TypeScript
  • Simulation
  • Procedural generation
  • React

Run it in the arcade

This website

Ongoing

The lab itself: Next.js App Router, Prisma, and NextAuth with role-based admin, a markdown blog with live-preview editor, an arcade with per-user save states, and the photo-notebook design system you're looking at.

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Prisma
  • NextAuth

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