Four Northwestern computer science students received honorable mentions from the Computing Research Association for their undergraduate research. The honorees include McCormick seniors Marko Veljanovski and Sean Rhee, McCormick junior Kevin Hayes and McCormick sophomore Brian Chen.
The annual CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award competition requires department-nominations for applicants.
“It’s really hard, especially in system CS, to know whether what you’ve done is novel at all,” Hayes said. “This was a nice signal to me that what I’m doing actually is research. I’d like to get my PhD someday, and so this is a good sign that I’m on the right track.”
At NU, Hayes is advised by McCormick Prof. Peter Dinda. He said his interests lie in operating systems — specifically, the interplay between operating systems and compilers, virtual machines and programming languages in general.
Rhee, who is also advised by Dinda, credited the award to the computer science faculty at NU.
“Me getting the award is basically entirely tied to the fact that I am surrounded by very supportive faculty, not only in enabling a productive research environment, but also just in actually caring about members of the lab receiving recognition,” Rhee said.
Veljanovski is advised by McCormick Prof. Zach Wood-Doughty. He said this is his second year getting recognized by the CRA.
He is currently focused on a subfield called robust machine learning, he said.
“I’m going to be doing a PhD starting in September while also working in robust machine learning, so it’s definitely very motivating and encouraging to be recognized by the CRA,” Veljanovski.
Chen said he was awarded for his undergraduate research at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was advised by CMU Prof. Jill Fain Lehman and focused on large language models as a medical assistant for post-operative care procedures
Chen then started researching at NU in the Sensing, Perception, Interactive Computing and Experiences Lab under the advising of McCormick Prof. Karan Ahuja. Chen said he’s been interested in machine learning.
“Instead of the (award) that means something to me, I think it’s my work,” Chen said. “I’ve gained a lot of experience in how research looks and how to do research even as a better programmer.”
Chen said he encourages other students to simply take a shot at finding research.
“One of the benefits of Northwestern, it’s a pretty small student size, and there’s a lot of faculty that are open to hosting students,” Chen said. “Simply reach out to take the class. Reach out to them, and a lot of them are willing to take you in and teach you from scratch.”
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