Author: Amy J. Ko

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… Continue reading Transferring Into Impactful Computing Research

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… Continue reading Cutting Through the Noise: Improving Weakly Supervised Machine Learning for Practical Applications

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… Continue reading Goodbye Accounting, Hello High-performance Computing

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… Continue reading Advancing the Theory of Programmable Matter for Swarm Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems

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.  Aleesha quickly got involved in research at NNU, a private university with only 2,000 total… Continue reading Here for Good: Cancer Detection, Community Service, and Beyond

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… Continue reading Overcoming Adversity and Finding a Path to Research

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,… Continue reading Moving into the Realm of Privacy and Security

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… Continue reading Using Exploration as a Catalyst Toward Research-Definition

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… Continue reading Leveraging an Inviting Undergraduate Research Community