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Undergrad Explores Research in Neural Differential Equations

This Q&A highlight features Winnie Xu, a Finalist in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Winnie graduated from the University of Toronto and is now a Student Researcher at Facebook AI Research (Meta AI). Some of her recent work in the generative learning space includes training generalist multi-game agents, a new model inspired by fractal compression, and a probabilistic framework for composing large language model generations. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Jay Zou, an Honorable Mention in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Jay is a senior in a combined B.A. and M.S. program at Northwestern University. He recently finished a term at Apple and is now working as a visiting researcher at Stanford University. He will be returning to Apple this summer as a camera architecture intern, and then beginning his PhD in Applied Physics at Yale University in the fall, focusing on unconventional computing architecture and quantum nonlinear optics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Crescentia Jung, an Honorable Mention in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Crescentia graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now at Cornell University pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Science. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Empathy in Condolences: Computational Methods for Delivering Thoughtful Condolences

This Q&A highlight features Naitian Zhou, an Honorable Mention in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Naitian graduated from the University of Michigan and is now a Information Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Tiana Fitzgerald, an Honorable Mention in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Tiana graduated from Princeton University and is now an Engineering Analyst at Goldman Sachs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Naveen Raman, a Finalist in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Naveen graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is now at the University of Cambridge on a Churchill Scholarship to pursue an MPhil in Advanced Computer Science. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Ellie Young, an Honorable Mention in the 2022 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Ellie graduated from New College of Florida and is now a Societal Computing Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Ben Jacobsen, an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Ben graduated from the University of Arizona and is now a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Rhea Jain, an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Rhea graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and is now a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Ryan Kemmer, an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Ryan graduated from Arizona State and is now a Software Development Engineer at Amazon. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Sarah Bawabe, an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Sarah graduated from Brown University in 2021 with degrees in Astrophysics and Computer Science and is now a software engineer with Verb Energy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Baicheng Chen, a Finalist in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Baicheng graduated from the University at Buffalo in May 2021. He is now pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of California San Diego. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Kiersten Campbell, a Finalist in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Kiersten graduated from Williams College in 2021 with a double major in Computer Science and Biology and is now in a post-baccalaureate research position. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Lauren Baron, recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Lauren is currently completing her junior year at the University of Delaware in the College of Engineering and Honors College, majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Cybersecurity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Zion Leonahenahe Basque, recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. A Fall 2020 graduate from Arizona State University (ASU), Zion continues his studies at ASU as a Ph.D. student in computer science. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features McKenna Lewis, recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. McKenna is a computer science major and currently works as an undergraduate researcher in the UCSD School of Medicine. In McKenna’s interview, she shares how she has benefited from showing resilience through faltering confidence and how supportive research programs and mentors helped her succeed. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This month’s research highlight showcases Juno Mayer, an honorable mention recipient in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Juno graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.S. in Computer & Information Science and minors in Mathematics and Music Technology. He now works as a software engineer at Zais Group, a credit management firm based in New Jersey. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

This Q&A highlight features Ellie Mamantov, recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2021 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers award program. Ellie graduated from Carleton College in June 2021 with a double major in computer science and psychology. She is now a computer science PhD student at Yale University. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Curious about summer opportunities in computer science, Courtney Miller learned about Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) in her first year at the New College of Florida. Having assisted in clinical trials in high school, she was eager to give research in computer science a try. “I really enjoyed that experience, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to try out academic research.”

When Sara Boyd transferred to Southwestern University (SU) as a sophomore, research was not on her radar. That quickly changed when she attended the symposium for Southwestern’s SCOPE program, a university-wide summer research opportunity for undergraduates from any major. “I was fascinated by projects that used AI to generate art, music and competitive Pacman playing agents,” Sara recalls. “SU prides itself on its interdisciplinary opportunities, and here I was able to see it first-hand.” Sara left the symposium thinking research might be worth trying someday.

Esteban Safranchik hopes to harness the potential of weakly supervised machine learning to impact fields beyond computer science. Now a PhD student at the University of Washington, Esteban got his start in research as an undergraduate at Brown University. His work was published at the 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference and is also used by economists and data scientists.

Janaan Lake is living proof that it’s never too late to pursue a career in computing. After working 17 years as a Certified Public Accountant, she decided the time was right to pursue a computer science degree and enrolled at the University of Utah. “Although changing careers in midlife has been more challenging than I anticipated, it has also been more rewarding.”

Joseph Briones wants to help robots work together more effectively. While double majoring in Computer Science and Math at Arizona State University (ASU), Joseph has worked towards extending the theory of programmable matter for applications in swarm robotics and multi-agent robot systems. His undergraduate research revolved around the 3D Amoebot model for self-organizing particle systems, a 3D programmable matter simulator. His work also resulted in two publications to the 2018 and 2019 International Symposium on Self-Stabilizing Systems. Currently, he is a computer science PhD student at his alma mater, furthering the research he started as an undergraduate.

Aleesha Chavez, a senior Computer Science major at Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) in Idaho, embodies her school’s motto of “Here for Good” as she brings her passion for helping others and her love of CS to research, teaching, and service.

After graduating from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Spring 2020, Jonathan Chan continues to pursue his research interests in programming languages (PL) as a master’s student at UBC. His work has resulted in a proof of concept for more robust termination checking in Coq, an interactive proof assistant.

Christian “Chris” Hill wants to transform the way we sense the world around us. His interest in human augmentation and sensory extension research began early in his college experience. During his second semester at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU Boulder), Chris took a new course on children’s education, human augmentation, and transhumanism taught by Mike Eisenberg, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Institute of Cognitive Science.

Currently pursuing a master’s degree at her recent alma mater, Boise State University, Ashlee Milton investigates problems related to information retrieval for niche user groups, especially children. Her work has resulted in four publications at ACM conferences and the Aslib Journal of Information Management.

Zaina Aljallad, a recent University of Central Florida (UCF) alumna, researched ways to empower all users, regardless of technical background, with strategies to protect their personal data while using a multitude of apps and services. She published two papers and presented her work at ACM conferences and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

After taking an Intro to Programming Languages class, Marilyn became interested in programming languages. Her teaching assistant participated in PL research and recruited her to their project. Over a period of two years starting in her sophomore year, Marilyn collaborated with her research advisor, who is also chair of the CS department at Tufts, Kathleen Fisher on research problems in Haskell optimization.

Diego showcases the persistence and determination of a researcher. As an immigrant from Venezuela, finding financial support and resources during his academic pursuits has been difficult given the current status of his home country. This has created uncertainty at times, but Diego has been able to persevere. He balanced his studies with a full-time machine learning developer position.

Kimberly is in her final year of undergraduate studies at the University of Washington (UW), where she double majors in Computer Engineering and Mathematics. Within UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, she has been working with Professors Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno on problems related to privacy and security, in particular, to identify and address the risks that future computer systems might raise before they become pervasive.

Andriy Mulyar, a proponent of supportive research environments, is currently pursuing a dual degree in Computer Science and Mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). His research journey began during his senior year in high school where he participated in a natural language processing project under Dr. Bridget McInnes through an outreach program coordinated by the Computer Science program at Andriy’s high school (CIT at Deep Run High School). The experience ignited an intrigue in machine learning which Andriy began to further explore in college.

Finding Passion in Computer Science through Research

Being a Hispanic woman in a STEM field presents different obstacles for many young women. At times, this means inability to find belonging, purpose, or passion in a discipline. In particular, this rings true within the bouts of undergraduate research. Sheila has broken down those barriers by diving in head first into an array of research activities. Sheila leveraged a positive meeting with two graduate students who were excited about their research in physics, which resulted in her exploration of research opportunities in computer science. Oftentimes, positive role models or helpful examples can trigger one’s shift into new pursuits.

Many graduate students do not have extensive undergraduate research experience and undergraduate students may find it difficult to identify research opportunities. Yet Eric found a welcoming community of researchers at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering. He recalls: “We [Faculty] worked together to select future research topics that I wanted to explore, including embodiment design in interactive robots, adaptive models for attention acquisition, and embodied gestures.” These opportunities are not very common among undergraduates at other schools and institutions, but Eric has taken advantage and began to develop his research profile.

As a first-generation, Latino college student, Andy Rosales-Elias defies the standard image of a computer science researcher. At a two-week science and math program preceding his first year at UC Santa Barbara, Andy recalls: “I remember one night hearing a cohort member talking on the phone to his parent, who was a professor at another university, about his research problem, and I couldn’t help but think that I was somehow inferior and had a huge disadvantage in terms of pre-existing knowledge and resources.”

As a high school student, Jalex attended the Canada/USA Mathcamp, a program where mathematicians teach five weeks of math classes to high school students. After the Mathcamp, Jalex was convinced to pursue research in mathematical logic, taking graduate courses in model theory and set theory upon arrival as a first-year student at Caltech.

Xuan Huang graduated from Bryn Mawr College with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Utah studying Computer Graphics. A summer research internship influenced her decision to attend graduate school.

Being a curious high school student, Siddharth was part of the Robotics Team at Gunn High School, which compelled him to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. However, after getting introduced to Natural Language Processing, and being an avid reader, Sidd realized that he wanted to pursue both his interests – Computer Science and Literature together, and transferred to Brown University soon after his freshman year. Sidd is currently a senior at Brown, dual-concentrating in both Computer Science and the Literary Arts.

Computing has been a part of Kalina Petrova’s life since she first took part in a 5th grade extra-curricular programming class. Fascinated by the process of solving computational problems, Kalina had immersed herself in research by the time she reached high school, presenting research projects at national conferences around her home country of Bulgaria. She also participated in the Research Science Institute, a 6-week research program for high school students at MIT, working on a computational neuroscience project.

In academia, research often leads individuals to conferences. For Nathaniel Yazdani, it was a conference that lead him to research. In the summer before transferring to the University of Washington from a local community college, Nathaniel had just learned his first functional programming language. Curious as to why someone would design “such a strange language,” he began investigating the world of programming languages online. Interested to learn more, he applied and was awarded funding from the ACM Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop to attend the International Conference on Functional Programming that summer. In what he described as a welcoming community, Nathaniel used the opportunity to learn more about programming language research, continually engaging with other attendees and student volunteers. Becoming eager to give research a try for himself, reached out again to the conference’s keynote speaker, Dr. Ras Bodik, who happened to be also be moving to the University of Washington that fall. They connected after his talk, and by the start of classes, Dr. Bodik had agreed to become Nathaniel’s research advisor.

The field of medicine prides itself on being evidence-based, but where does that evidence come from? With aspirations for a career in medicine, this was one of the questions that fascinated Vinyas Harish, which would eventually lead him on a path from the engineering lab to the operating room. Although Vinyas’s research career began as an undergraduate at Queen’s University, his interest in understanding how science and engineering could be applied to medicine began much earlier. As a high school student, Vinyas attended a research open house where he met Dr. Gabor Fichtinger, whose students were demonstrating an open-source system for ultrasound-guided lumbar puncture. He recalls that after seeing what the realm of transitional clinical engineering was like, he knew he had to get involved. Upon enrolling as an undergraduate at Queen’s, Vinyas joined Dr. Fichtinger in the Laboratory for Percutaneous Surgery (PERK), where he would work during the summers after his first three years and the academic terms over his junior and senior year.

Planning for the summer after his sophomore year, Louis Jenkins had focused his efforts on securing an industry internship. However, in what he describes as “sheer coincidence,” Louis was forwarded a departmental email that would alter not only his summer plans, but his overall career trajectory. The email highlighted the NSF summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, and with recommendations from both a professor and the Computer Science Department Chair, Louis was selected as one of 14 students from the PASSHE region (Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education). Louis chose the REU at Lehigh University under Dr. Michael Spear because of their shared interest in parallel computing, but he recalls that it was Dr. Spear’s mention that the problem they were trying to solve “might not even be possible” that sparked his interest and passion.

Originally a pre-med student at Loyola University, Laurynas Kalesinskas had envisioned his undergraduate degree as a stepping-stone to attend medical school. An interest in research and a passion to create change in healthcare led him to computational research. Fascinated by the projects he worked on, Laurynas shifted his focus. Graduating with a Bioinformatics and Biology double major and minors in Computer Science and Biostatistics, he decided to apply to Ph.D. programs, and he is currently a first year Ph.D. student in Biomedical Informatics at Stanford University.

Yisu Remy Wang was sophomore at Tufts University when he enrolled in Professor Kathleen Fisher’s programming languages course. In that course, Professor Fisher exposed students to some areas of current research which sparked Yisu’s interest and curiosity. Yisu spoke with Professor Fisher and she agreed to act as his research advisor. This was the beginning of a mentoring relationship that shaped much of the rest of Yisu’s time at Tufts and has had a lasting positive impact.

A Running Start into Research

Christopher Mackie had an unusual entry into computer science. As high school student in Vancouver, Washington, he participated in the Running Start Program, which allowed him to obtain a 2-year associate degree in computer science at a local college while finishing his last two years of high school. He then enrolled in the BS/MS program in computer science at the University of Washington (UW). Although Christopher came to college with a substantial amount of computing background, he was mindful that he had not yet had the opportunity to work on a long-term open-ended problem.

June Chen’s passion for learning was abundantly evident when she arrived as an undergraduate at Rice University. She pursued a triple major in electrical engineering (BSEE), mathematics (BA), and medieval and early modern studies (BA), and she sought additional opportunities to learn outside of her coursework.

Alex Ozdemir is intensely curious about understanding how things work. Perhaps this curiosity is what drove him to pursue a self-designed major in “Computational, Mathematical, and Physical Theory” at Harvey Mudd College. After completing two summer internships in industry, Alex decided to try research. He began seeking research opportunities around campus. He remembered enjoying the algorithms that he’d studied in an introductory Computational Biology class, so he reached out to the professor, Dr. Ran Libeskind-Hadas, who happily agreed to supervise Alex on a research project.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Lillian Tsai had always assumed that a normal career path for a computer scientist involved working at a company or, perhaps, launching a start-up. That was the path that she imagined for herself when she enrolled at Harvard University and chose to major in computer science.

While Gloria Kim’s interest in computing started in the classroom, her curiosity in deeper questions and desire to learn quickly took her outside of any curriculum. While taking an Introduction to Parallel Programming course with Prof. Vivek Sarkar at Rice University, Gloria found the topics led her to questions that fell outside the scope of the class. Rather than leave those questions unanswered, Gloria decided to take the initiative, asking Prof. Sarkar to join his lab as an undergraduate researcher in the summer following her sophomore year. In her research outside of the classroom, Gloria says she found even more enjoyment in learning for learning’s sake. “The entire process is driven by curiosity – question after question, as opposed to the contents of a syllabus.”

When Julia Woodward began her first year at the University of Florida, she did not know that her interests in design, art, and computing would ultimately merge to form an exciting path in computing research. During an introductory meeting for the Digital Arts and Science major, several professors gave presentations on their work and research interests. Julia was particularly intrigued by the work of Dr. Lisa Anthony, whose research focuses on child-computer interaction. Julia reached out to Professor Anthony who agreed to advise her in research.