Fall, 2022
Uttaran Bhattacharya
Graduating: Fall, 2022
Area of Research/Career Interest: Human Motion Understanding
Website: https://uttaranb127.github.io/
What is your Research about?
My research primarily involves designing automated methods to detect human emotions based on their body expressions visible in multimedia contents such as images and videos, as well as designing automated methods to synthesize animations of 3D virtual human characters with emotionally expressive body movements, as a key component of creating engaging and immersive multimedia contents.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
Due to availability of enormous quantities of multimedia contents for consumption in all aspects of the modern lifestyle, my work is relevant in making multimedia creation, editing, streaming and sharing faster, more accurate, and resource efficient, all while making the day-to-day experiences of end-users more engaging and wholesome. My work also addresses key research challenges on the development of stable and reliable computational methods to both measure and codify human emotions from their body expressions, and synthesize those emotional body expressions in a scalable and efficient manner.
What is your future research and career objective?
Expand the broader domains of multimodal content detection, synthesis, and editing in my career role as a research scientist.
Kanishka Ganguly
Graduating: Fall, 2022
Area of Research/Career Interest: Robotics
Website: https://kganguly.umiacs.io
What is your Research about?
Robot Grasping with Tactile Feedback
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
For useful robots that can operate with and around humans, we need dexterous grasping capabilities, which in turn necessitates robust tactile feedback algorithms.
What is your future research and career objective?
I will be joining the industry, working on automated calibration for AR headsets (cameras, and other sensors) using robot manipulators.
More about me:
Joining Magic Leap in Sunnyvale. UMD provided all the resources I could have wanted for my research, special thanks to my advisors (Yiannis, Cornelia) and to all the members of the PRG group for making this possible.
Amin Ghiasi
Graduating: Fall, 2022
Area of Research/Career Interest: Machine Learning/Deep Learning
Website: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~amin
What is your Research about?
I study methods that help us understand how neural networks make a decision. More specifically, my research explains the features learned by neural networks through visualization.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
Neural networks are high-performing black boxes that can learn almost anything, and my research provides tools for studying them. If a neural network is like a human body, my research is like putting the body through an x-ray machine and looking at its underlying hidden processes.
What is your future research and career objective?
I genuinely enjoy doing research in machine learning. Despite its fast growth, deep learning is still an unexplored area with much undiscovered potential. I like projects that require engineering and research, and because of that, I am joining Apple in the Spring of 2023 as a machine learning engineer.
Sahil Singla
Graduating: Fall, 2022
Area of Research/Career Interest: Adversarial robustness, Diagnosing and mitigating model failures
Website: https://github.com/singlasahil14
What is your Research about?
My research broadly focuses on reliable deep learning. Within this domain, I have worked on provable defenses against adversarial attacks, defenses against unforeseen adversarial threat models, understanding and mitigating model failures.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
My research shows that it is possible to discover failure modes at large scale. It can be useful in diagnosing the deployment scenarios where a model is likely to fail before the actual deployment.
What is your future research and career objective?
I want to further work on improving the robustness and reliability of deep models.
More about me:
I will be joining Google Research.
Leonidas Tsepenekas
Graduating: Fall, 2022
Area of Research/Career Interest: Algorithmic Fairness
Website: https://www.ltsepene.com/
What is your Research about?
My research interests revolve around Algorithmic Fairness and Stochastic Models for Combinatorial Optimization. Specifically, I am interested in identifying meaningful notions of fairness, translating them into rigorous mathematical objects, and incorporating them in classical algorithmic problems. For instance, my work includes fairness in Clustering and Graph Cut problems. Furthermore, I study the interplay of fairness and stochasticity, with emphasis on how the latter can ensure socially fair algorithmic solutions.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
In my opinion, with automated decisions becoming more and more ubiquitous in critical areas affecting the well-being of human lives, e.g., issuing home loans via estimating credit scores, predicting recidivism and computing risk factors for health insurance applicants, it is evident that the design of fair algorithms that minimize bias and discrimination is of vital importance.
What is your future research and career objective?
I want to continue my research on Algorithmic Fairness, with the ultimate goal being seeing my models help people in real life scenarios.
Weija Xu
Graduating: Fall, 2022
Area of Research/Career Interest: Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
Website: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~weijia/
What is your Research about?
Building data-efficient, controllable, and robust text generation models
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
My research helps break the language barriers and assists people in communicating and collaborating across languages.
What is your future research and career objective?
My future research goal is to advance the current technique for language generation and develop models that can better assist people with their daily activities through natural language interactions.
More about me:
I'm very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Marine Carpuat, who's been very supportive over the past five years. After graduation, I'll be joining Microsoft Research as a senior researcher.
Spring, 2023
Erica Blum
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Cryptography
Website: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~erblum/
What is your Research about?
I study cryptography and consensus algorithms, focusing on security of consensus protocols under different trust models and network conditions.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
How do we build a threat model for a system like Bitcoin, or Whatsapp? How do we know they're secure? Techniques from cryptography and consensus algorithms are key to understanding the security of the complex systems we use every day.
What is your future research and career objective?
I'm looking forward to joining Reed College's Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor, starting in Fall 2023.
Yang (Trista) Cao
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: NLP, Fairness, Human Centered AI
Website: https://tristaycao.github.io/
What is your Research about?
My research interest is about human-centered AI. I study fairness in NLP systems, specifically focusing on stereotyping. I also work on how to design and construct NLP models that prioritize users' values.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
In recent years, with the advancement of deep learning techniques, developers started to deploy these machines into real-life applications. However, since the systems were mainly designed with concentrations on machine improvements rather than user experiences, these machines face crucial challenges during deployment. Therefore, my research serves the purpose on adapting these systems to serve real-life users.
What is your future research and career objective?
I hope to continue working on developing human-centered NLP systems.
More about me:
Job prospects: Industry research positions
Kelsey Fulton
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Usable security/secure software development
Website: https://cs.umd.edu/~kfulton
What is your Research about?
My research centers around the intersection of computer security and usability with a focus on the human factors affecting software developers and security professionals. I’m interested in understanding how software developers and security professionals reason and think about security in their job roles. Specifically, I’d like to explore how current security interventions, tools, programming languages, and organizational processes fail developers and security professionals and how we can improve them.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
My work provides scientifically-based recommendations for policy, education, programming language and tool changes making secure software development easier.
What is your future research and career objective?
Moving forward, I will expand my work to explore how the security assumptions developers make affect secure development; various approaches (like content moderation and security warnings) to improving current security tooling, processes, and resources; and best practices for conducting human-centered secure-development studies.
Kamal Gupta
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Computer Graphics
Website: https://kampta.github.io
What is your Research about?
Learning to generate 3D models and videos by learning unstructured multimodal internet data.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
In the last few years, there have been a number of works demonstrating the use of deep generative models to create visual data. These models are able to convert sketches into paintings, transfer style from one image to another, or convert an image of semantic labels to realistic scenes, and vice versa. Without a doubt, computational approaches will play a pivotal role in revolutionizing the way we create visual data. Existing approaches in unsupervised or generative modeling, often perform image synthesis using one shot black-box models. In my research,I lay the groundwork on how deep generative models can be used to aid humans with the creative process.
What is your future research and career objective?
My long-term goal is to enable storytellers to create intricate 2D and 3D visual content seamlessly.
Kyungjun Lee
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Human-Computer Interaction
Website: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~kjlee/
What is your Research about?
Making the world accessible to all using AI.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
Machine intelligence can help computers capute information about our world, which used to be inaccessible to some users. We all need different types of information, and having access to such information can be helpful!
What is your future research and career objective?
Find and implement ideas for AI for accessibility.
More about me:
Currently working on making the Internet and Chrome accessible to all. Feel free to reach out to me if you have suggestions regarding this topic!
Deepthi Raghunandan
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Data Science Tools / Data Engineering
Website: https://cs.umd.edu/~draghun1
What is your Research about?
I'm researching ways to leverage analytical metadata to improve the performance of data analysts.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
My research contributes to our understanding on how people explore data, collect insights and how they reflect on those insights. These contributions can be applied towards bettering the way we educate ourselves and each other.
What is your future research and career objective?
I want to build and engineer comprehensive data science tools for folks in the natural sciences. I want to enable the rapid adoption and development of data-science tools in climate change research.
More about me:
Tom Hurst has been an awesome support.
Snehesh Shrestha
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: CV/ AI/ ML
Website: http://snehesh.com
What is your Research about?
AI for Music Education
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
PhD Dissertation The fundamental format of music education has stayed the same in the last 400 years. A set curriculum is taught to a batch of students with once a week 30 min to 1 hour of private lessons, usually for parents who can afford them. In between sessions, students practice without any feedback. The teachers have to rely on the small window during the private lessons to make observations. This gap makes the learning process slower and discouraging to many students. My research bridges this gap by creating technologies that measure students’ strengths and weaknesses. These measurements are used to provide feedback to the students and create personalized practice materials to help them get better at their weaknesses. These practice analytics is then shared with the teacher along with practice material recommendations. Hence, the teacher has better visibility of the focus areas and can control the curriculum per their teaching preference.
Another benefit of this technology is that it will widen access to music education for all. It will allow teachers and students to connect even if they are thousands of miles away. It will augment teachers’ capabilities to manage and personalize teaching.
What is your future research and career objective?
With my current work, I am only scratching the surface. I plan to release this application to the public and continue tackling many research challenges that are yet to be solved to address the needs of this application.
Chahat Deep Singh
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Computer Vision and Robotics
Website: https://chahatdeep.github.io/
What is your Research about?
My research focuses on developing Artificial Intelligence driven minimalist perception frameworks for resource-constrained robots.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
Small mobile robots mitigate the human risk of search-and-rescue as inspection in extreme and low-light conditions such narrow caves and failed nuclear power plants. As a result, such tiny autonomous drones with onboard capability can pollinate flowers in the wild. These small robots are safer, more agile and can be easily distributed as swarms.
What is your future research and career objective?
Working on developing minimalist AI-driven perception frameworks for resource-constrained robots as a faculty member.
More about me:
Currently applying for Computer Science, ECE and Robotics departments.
Yanchao Sun
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Reinforcement Learning, Trustworthy Machine Learning, Representation Learning
Website: https://ycsun2017.github.io/
What is your Research about?
Improving the robustness and adaptability of reinforcement learning methods for real-life applications.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
My research makes machine learning approaches safer and more efficient, which can facilitate the application of AI techniques to real-world scenarios and benefit our lives.
What is your future research and career objective?
Developing trustworthy and widely-applicable AI systems.
More about me:
Many thanks to my advisor Furong, my boyfriend Yuxiang, my parents, all my labmates, as well as my cat Aspen, for their great support during my PhD!
Shaopeng Zhu
Graduating: Spring, 2023
Area of Research/Career Interest: Graph Theory, Model Theory, Computational Complexity
Website: https://sites.google.com/umd.edu/shaopengzhu/home
What is your Research about?
Complexity of deciding the membership of the set of finite graphs that homomorphically map to the generic structure of certain hereditary class of finite graphs.
What is the impact of your research? Why should a broader audience care?
Expanding the study of CSP of non-omega-categorical, non-arithmetic infinite structures. It might appeal to the broader audience in that infinite graphs and graph homomorphisms are fun to play with.
What is your future research and career objective?
It would be interesting to learn more about algebraic, combinatorial and dynamical properties of (aut groups or interesting closed subgroups of) Fraïssé limits. As for career, I am happy to make use of my knowledge in computer science and other disciplines to benefit the society in any appropriate ways.