Brown CS News

The Computing Research Association (CRA) is a coalition of more than 200 organizations with the mission of enhancing innovation by joining with industry, government, and academia to strengthen research and advance education in computing. Every year, they recognize North American students who show phenomenal research potential with their Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and for 2025-2026, four Brown CS students received honors: Joshua Yang (Runner-Up) as well as Arnie He, Wanjia Fu, and Alexander Portland (Honorable Mentions).

Joshua Yang

Joshua has conducted research in human-computer interaction with Brown CS faculty member Jeff Huang, focusing on creativity support tools that expand the expressive capabilities of vector graphics. His work includes developing filtered.ink, a system for dynamic illustrations using SVG filters and animated patterns, and Portal.ink, which enables 2.5D illustration and non-linear storytelling. He’s also worked on automating video editing at Adobe Research using large language models and optimization techniques.

“I would like to deeply thank everyone at the Brown HCI lab for a wonderful four years of research,” Joshua says. His work has been presented and published in CHI 2023, accompanied by a 1st place award, UIST 2024 and 2025, and CHI 2025.

Arnie He

Arnie participated in research focused on reinforcement learning and continual learning, working to develop intelligent agents capable of solving complex tasks in continually shifting environments. His work aims to advance adaptive systems that can learn over time and operate effectively under changing conditions.

“I am deeply thankful for [Brown CS faculty members] Amy Greenwald and George Konidaris for showing me ways to do research and for all the inspiring conversations over the years,” Arnie says. He plans to continue his research by pursuing a PhD in computer science at Princeton University.

"I would also like to thank Arjun Prakash, Saket Tiwari, David Tao, and Kaicheng Guo for being wonderful collaborators, teachers, and friends. They have offered incredible insights and we went through hardships together,” Arnie says.

Wanjia Fu

“Humans rely on our senses to perceive the world, among which vision and touch are two of the most critical senses,” Wanjia says. “My research focuses on how robots can also make use of this multisensory information to perceive and interact with the world like humans do.”

Wanjia’s research focuses on enabling robots to better perceive and interact with the world through multisensory information, particularly by combining vision and touch for contact-rich manipulation and world modeling. She is currently applying to PhD programs in robotics.

“I’m honored to receive honorable mention for the award, and I’m beyond grateful for the guidance, support, and encouragement from [Brown CS faculty member] Srinath Sridhar throughout my research, as well as the mentorship from Hongyu Li, a PhD student in the lab, and help from other collaborators,” she says.

Alexander Portland

Alexander’s research with Brown CS faculty members Malte Schwarzkopf and Will Crichton is in systems and programming languages, where he is developing tools to help developers verify properties of their code. His current project, sniff-test, builds on documentation practices in the Rust ecosystem to identify issues such as undefined behavior and runtime panics. He was first introduced to research through earlier work on the Sesame project with both Malte and Brown CS PhD alum Kinan Dak Albab.

“I’d like to thank both my current advisors Malte and Will and my past advisor Kinan for their encouragement and constant passion that has helped build my own love for systems research,” says Alexander. “I look forward to continuing my current research project with sniff-test and doing more in the future!”

The full list of Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award recipients and honorees is available here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.