Brown CS Welcomes A Record Number Of Undergraduate Summer Researchers
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on March 22, 2018
Click the link that follows for more information about our undergraduate research program.
For decades, we've heard from our undergrads that the chance to perform cutting-edge research is one of the primary reasons why they chose Brown University's Department of Computer Science (Brown CS). Far from the clerical duties or errand-running that some have encountered elsewhere, we offer the chance to work with world-class faculty in a truly collaborative environment on problems of real worth. Just in the past six months, one of our undergrad researchers was chosen as one of 25 students from a pool of 6,432 for an Undergraduate Award and two others won CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Honorable Mentions.
During the summer, Brown's Undergraduate Teaching and Research Awards (UTRAs) provide students with a $3,750 stipend for their work with faculty. This year, Brown CS has received a record number of them, and they reflect both the growth of computer science at Brown and the breadth and depth of our research:
- Sathya Anisetti and Jason Zagorski will be working with Professor Serdar Kadioglu toward the DIMACS Optimization Modelling Challenge on vehicle routing problem with stochastic demand and time windows
- Michael Darby will be working with Professor Steve Reiss on testing and implementing new features into a novel coding environment
- Erica Guo will be working with Professor Michael Littman
- Zach Horvitz will be working with Professor Michael Littman on a neural network-based pun generator
- Amy Huang will be working with Professor R. Iris Bahar on improving concurrent computing with processing in memory
- Lucas Kasser and Henry Stone will be working with Professor James Tompkin to develop tools to empower media producers to edit light-field images in a spatially consistent manner
- Seungchan Kim will be working with Professor George Konidaris on investigating new algorithms for deep reinforcement learning
- Jiaju (Jason) Ma will be working with Professor Jeff Huang on user behavior-powered sensor fusion systems
- Shivam Nadimpalli will be working with Professor Sorin Istrail on hyperbolic groups and graph theory with applications to protein folding
- Shoshana Simons will be working with Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi to understand what makes a good notional machine (a model of computation used to think about how code is understood and executed) for Pyret, then develop software that visualizes the notional machine to help users, especially novice ones, understand the language's semantics
- Andrew Wagner will be working with Senior Research Associate Tim Nelson on: (1) using logic to aid users in verifying correctness of a system and (2) presenting the output of formal methods tools
- Nathaniel Weir will be working with Professor Ugur Çetintemel on a learned natural language interface for database systems
- Anna White will be working with Professor Andy van Dam
- Conrad Zborowski will be working with Professors Anna Lysyanskaya and Eli Upfal and PhD students Sasha Berkoff and Leah Rosenbloom to test the feasibility of provably secure onion routing protocols
We also have a number of Interdisciplinary Team (I-Team) UTRAs as part of a program designed to increase research opportunities for a diverse range of first and second year students, encourage student intellectual growth through peer mentorship and group learning, and encourage interdisciplinary scholarship between and among Brown faculty:
- Mary Dong, Yun Ho Kim, Sumera Subzwari, Harold Triedman, Amy Wang, and Luke Zhu will be working with Professor Ugur Çetintemel and Professor Ryan McTaggart (Brown Radiology/RI Hospital) to develop a system for the analysis of medical imaging data
- Several students will be working with Stefanie Tellex and other Brown CS roboticists to begin creating a reusable platform for teaching CSCI 1951-R Introduction to Robotics using a drone.
We're looking forward to a great summer, and we can't wait to share the stories of their results in the days ahead.
For more information, please click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communication Outreach Specialist Jesse C. Polhemus.