HelloResearch

Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science

October 26-28, 2018

Speakers

Indiana University Bloomington

FRIDAY

Welcome to HelloResearch

Kay Connelly
Associate Dean for Research
Professor — Informatics
Indiana University

Kay Connelly is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. Her research interests are in the intersection of mobile and pervasive computing and healthcare. In particular, she is interested in issues that influence user acceptance of health technologies, such as privacy, integration into one's lifestyle, convenience, and utility. Dr. Connelly works with a variety of patient groups, including very sick populations who need help in managing their disease, healthy populations interested in preventative care, and senior citizens looking to remain in their homes for as long as possible. Dr. Connelly received a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Indiana University (1995), and an M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.

Keynote Speaker

Timnit Gebru
Research Scientist
Google AI

Timnit Gebru recently joined Google AI after finishing her postdoc in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research's New York Lab. She earned her Ph.D. from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result, including fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. The Economist and others have recently covered part of this work. She is currently studying how to take dataset bias into account while designing machine learning algorithms, and the ethical considerations underlying any data mining project. As a cofounder of the group Black in AI, she works to both increase diversity in the field and reduce the impact of racial bias in the data.

Interacting with People with Disabilities

Shirley Stumpner
Director of Disability Services for Students
Indiana University

Shirley started with Disability Services for Students as a coordinator in August of 2012 and was offer the Director position in December 2014. She has a background teaching at both the public school and higher education levels and has over thirty year of experience in non-profit management working with people with disabilities. She has worked professionally with people with disabilities, in various capacities, since her undergraduate years. Originally from Long Island, New York, Shirley has worked in several mid-western states since completing her Masters and later Doctoral degree at Indiana University.

Mary Stores
Principal Accessibility Analyst
Assistive Technology and Accessibility Center
Indiana University

Mary provides functional testing and technical support to assistive technology users who are blind or have low vision. She leads the braille transcription and alternate media teams. Mary received her JAWS certification in March of 2015.

Meet Team Leaders

Elissa Booras
Project Manager — HelloResearch
School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Indiana University

Elissa is the Project Manager for the HelloResearch Conference. She is currently a fourth-year student at Indiana University pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Human-Centered Computing, and she also leads the IU student group Women Who Code. Previous research experiences of hers include machine learning/natural language processing, as well as a project on wind turbine energy distribution at Carnegie Mellon's OurCS Conference in 2017.

Friday Dinner Speakers

Katie Siek
Associate Professor — Informatics
School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Indiana University

Katie Siek is an associate professor in Informatics at Indiana University and the Director of Informatics Undergraduate Studies. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, she is interested in how sociotechnical interventions affect personal health and well being. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. She received the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Mentor-Advocate award from CEWiT, a prize given to faculty who display noteworthy mentorship and are nominated by their mentees or peers. She received the Borg Early Career Award, an annual award given by CRA-W to a woman in the early stages in her career who has made significant research contributions and an Engineering New Professor Award at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she used to work. She was named Woman of the Year in 2006 by the Women In Computing group at Indiana University.

Maggie Oates
Ph.D. Student — Computer Science
Graduate Research Assistant — Institute for Software Research
Carnegie Mellon University

Maggie is a 2nd-year Societal Computing Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security lab. She's had a wandering path through computing research topics, including Unicode design, agricultural robots, children's privacy drawings, secure authentication, codes of ethics, and sewing. She sits on the Board of Trustees for AnitaB.org and plans to someday work in technology policy.

Haley MacLeod
UX Researcher
Facebook

Haley is a UX Researcher at Facebook, where she seeks to understand how people browse and discover new people online. She is a recent graduate from Indiana University, where she completed her Ph.D. in Informatics, under the guidance of Kay Connelly and Katie Siek in the ProHealth group. Her dissertation research was focused on facilitating social support in rare disease and common chronic illness communities. During her Ph.D., she completed internships at PARC, Microsoft Research, and Facebook. She also has a Master of Science in Human Computer Interaction from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Commerce with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Calgary in Alberta.

SATURDAY

Research Poster Session

Aehong Min (session organizer)
Ph.D. Student — Informatics
Indiana University

Aehong Min is a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, studying under Professor Patrick Shih. Her main research interests are human-computer interaction and health informatics. Currently, she is working on research projects which are focusing on needs and issues of diverse caregivers, e-brethalyzer usage among college students, physical activity of people with autism, etc. She received a M.S. in Information Systems (Track: Digital Cultural Contents/UX) and a BA in Sociology from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Student Research Panel

Rin Metcalf (panel moderator)
Ph.D. Candidate — Computer Science
Indiana University

Rin is a Ph.D. candidate in the final year of the Computer Science program at Indiana University. Her background in psychology and linguistics has led her to tackle a wide range of problems related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. She studies and researches the application of machine learning methods to problems in domains such as social cognition, event segmentation, and health support systems. Her dissertation is the area of representation learning for storing textual and temporal information in memory for effective retrieval and adaptation. She has spent the summers during her program interning at Apple and will return there full time after graduation.

Paulette Koronkevich
Undergraduate Student — Computer Science
Indiana University

Paulette is a senior undergraduate at Indiana University, majoring in Computer Science with a focus on programming languages. She's currently applying to graduate programs to pursue her Ph.D. in programming languages, primarily interested in compilers and type systems. Paulette attended the OurCS conference last year at Carnegie Mellon. She's had some research experience — working with a professor at Indiana University as well as an REU at Carnegie Mellon University this past summer. She'll be able to provide some insight into pursuing other research opportunities after the conference, as well as commenting on any of her other activities — being an undergraduate teaching assistant, taking too many interesting classes, and jamming to cool tunes.

Atreyee Mukherjee
Ph.D. Candidate — Computer Science
Indiana University

Atreyee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science program at Indiana University. She primarily works on the problems related to Natural Language Processing. She has worked on projects related to detecting mental health issues from written text. Currently, she is working on identifying social factors (also known as social determinants of health) that affect the health and general well being of a person, using free text medical notes. Her dissertation focuses on improving domain adaptation and generating domain-expert models for parsing textual data.

Maggie Oates
Ph.D. Student — Computer Science
Graduate Research Assistant — Institute for Software Research
Carnegie Mellon University

Maggie is a 2nd-year Societal Computing Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security lab. She's had a wandering path through computing research topics, including Unicode design, agricultural robots, children's privacy drawings, secure authentication, codes of ethics, and sewing. She sits on the Board of Trustees for AnitaB.org and plans to someday work in technology policy.

Pam Thomas
Ph.D. Student — Computer Science
University of Notre Dame

Pam received her master's degree in computer science at Indiana University in May 2013. While there, she spent her time implementing new homomorphic encryption schemes and taking classes in algorithms, parallel computing, and database security, while improving her communication skills by passing on her knowledge to undergraduate students by teaching an introductory class in Scheme. In summer 2012, she gained practical experience in the computer science field by working in an internship where she managed code that had been compiled by an automatic MATLAB to C script parser. After graduation, she started to work for Eli Lilly and Company in the data mining space, leveraging technologies and creating services for people to solve business problems through data mining. Some of the larger projects that she has worked on include a large data migration project from legacy systems to SAP and an agile app development. Today she is working towards a Ph.D. in computer science at Notre Dame, with the aim of using machine learning to improve media literacy and stem the spread of misinformation.

Tian Linger Xu
Postdoctoral Fellow — Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University

Tian (Linger) Xu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. Her research focuses on interpersonal coordination in social interaction. To understand how humans develop the social skills needed to engage in smooth coordination with each other, she conducts infant-parent interaction experiments with state-of-the-art multimodal wearable sensors, such as head-mounted eye-tracker and wireless motion tracking system. She also develops novel time-series analysis methods to examine and model the mechanism that underlies real-time social coordination. Additionally, she uses social robotic agents to investigate the effects of different real-time responsive behaviors and learning models in human-robot interaction studies. She received her dual Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana University in 2018.

Writing a Statement of Purpose

Lamara Warren
Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion
School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Indiana University

Lamara Warren is an Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University and provides proficient guidance and leadership to the School on topics of diversity and inclusive excellence. Her research interests include higher education access and equity issues, diversity and social justice issues in higher education, Black women leadership development, cultural living learning communities, student-athletes, academic persistence, institutional research and institutional effectiveness. Ultimately, she is committed to increasing the number of underrepresented students obtaining advanced degrees, specifically in STEAM disciplines.

SUNDAY

Finding a Research Opportunity

Sarah Loos
Software Engineer
Google AI

Sarah Loos is a software engineer at Google AI who has worked on logical analysis and formal verification of distributed hybrid systems, and deep learning for theorem proving. She completed a Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, creating differential Refinement Logic for comparing and verifying hybrid systems. During her time at CMU, Sarah was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Sarah serves on the board of directors for Learning Equality. She has previously served on the board of trustees and board of advisors for AnitaB.org. Sarah was named Woman of the Year in 2009 by the Women In Computing group at Indiana University.

Katie Siek
Associate Professor — Informatics
School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering
Indiana University

Katie Siek is an associate professor in Informatics at Indiana University and the Director of Informatics Undergraduate Studies. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, she is interested in how sociotechnical interventions affect personal health and well being. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. She received the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Mentor-Advocate award from CEWiT, a prize given to faculty who display noteworthy mentorship and are nominated by their mentees or peers. She received the Borg Early Career Award, an annual award given by CRA-W to a woman in the early stages in her career who has made significant research contributions and an Engineering New Professor Award at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she used to work. She was named Woman of the Year in 2006 by the Women In Computing group at Indiana University.

FRIDAY


Welcome to HelloResearch
Kay Connelly Associate Dean for Research Professor — Informatics Indiana University

Kay Connelly is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. Her research interests are in the intersection of mobile and pervasive computing and healthcare. In particular, she is interested in issues that influence user acceptance of health technologies, such as privacy, integration into one's lifestyle, convenience, and utility. Dr. Connelly works with a variety of patient groups, including very sick populations who need help in managing their disease, healthy populations interested in preventative care, and senior citizens looking to remain in their homes for as long as possible. Dr. Connelly received a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Indiana University (1995), and an M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.

Keynote Speaker
Timnit Gebru Research Scientist Google AI

Timnit Gebru recently joined Google AI after finishing her postdoc in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research's New York Lab. She earned her Ph.D. from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result, including fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. The Economist and others have recently covered part of this work. She is currently studying how to take dataset bias into account while designing machine learning algorithms, and the ethical considerations underlying any data mining project. As a cofounder of the group Black in AI, she works to both increase diversity in the field and reduce the impact of racial bias in the data.

Interacting with People with Disabilities
Shirley Stumpner Director of Disability Services for Students Indiana University

Shirley started with Disability Services for Students as a coordinator in August of 2012 and was offer the Director position in December 2014. She has a background teaching at both the public school and higher education levels and has over thirty year of experience in non-profit management working with people with disabilities. She has worked professionally with people with disabilities, in various capacities, since her undergraduate years. Originally from Long Island, New York, Shirley has worked in several mid-western states since completing her Masters and later Doctoral degree at Indiana University.

Mary Stores Principal Accessibility Analyst Assistive Technology and Accessibility Center Indiana University

Mary provides functional testing and technical support to assistive technology users who are blind or have low vision. She leads the braille transcription and alternate media teams. Mary received her JAWS certification in March of 2015.

Meet Team Leaders
Elissa Booras Project Manager — HelloResearch School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Indiana University

Elissa is the Project Manager for the HelloResearch Conference. She is currently a fourth-year student at Indiana University pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Human-Centered Computing, and she also leads the IU student group Women Who Code. Previous research experiences of hers include machine learning/natural language processing, as well as a project on wind turbine energy distribution at Carnegie Mellon's OurCS Conference in 2017.

Friday Dinner Speakers
Katie Siek Associate Professor — Informatics School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Indiana University

Katie Siek is an associate professor in Informatics at Indiana University and the Director of Informatics Undergraduate Studies. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, she is interested in how sociotechnical interventions affect personal health and well being. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. She received the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Mentor-Advocate award from CEWiT, a prize given to faculty who display noteworthy mentorship and are nominated by their mentees or peers. She received the Borg Early Career Award, an annual award given by CRA-W to a woman in the early stages in her career who has made significant research contributions and an Engineering New Professor Award at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she used to work. She was named Woman of the Year in 2006 by the Women In Computing group at Indiana University.

Maggie Oates Ph.D. Student — Computer Science Graduate Research Assistant — Institute for Software Research Carnegie Mellon University

Maggie is a 2nd-year Societal Computing Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security lab. She's had a wandering path through computing research topics, including Unicode design, agricultural robots, children's privacy drawings, secure authentication, codes of ethics, and sewing. She sits on the Board of Trustees for AnitaB.org and plans to someday work in technology policy.

Haley MacLeod UX Researcher Facebook

Haley is a UX Researcher at Facebook, where she seeks to understand how people browse and discover new people online. She is a recent graduate from Indiana University, where she completed her Ph.D. in Informatics, under the guidance of Kay Connelly and Katie Siek in the ProHealth group. Her dissertation research was focused on facilitating social support in rare disease and common chronic illness communities. During her Ph.D., she completed internships at PARC, Microsoft Research, and Facebook. She also has a Master of Science in Human Computer Interaction from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Commerce with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Calgary in Alberta.


SATURDAY


Research Poster Session
Aehong Min (session organizer) Ph.D. Student — Informatics Indiana University

Aehong Min is a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, studying under Professor Patrick Shih. Her main research interests are human-computer interaction and health informatics. Currently, she is working on research projects which are focusing on needs and issues of diverse caregivers, e-brethalyzer usage among college students, physical activity of people with autism, etc. She received a M.S. in Information Systems (Track: Digital Cultural Contents/UX) and a BA in Sociology from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

Student Research Panel
Rin Metcalf (panel moderator) Ph.D. Candidate — Computer Science Indiana University

Rin is a Ph.D. candidate in the final year of the Computer Science program at Indiana University. Her background in psychology and linguistics has led her to tackle a wide range of problems related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. She studies and researches the application of machine learning methods to problems in domains such as social cognition, event segmentation, and health support systems. Her dissertation is the area of representation learning for storing textual and temporal information in memory for effective retrieval and adaptation. She has spent the summers during her program interning at Apple and will return there full time after graduation.

Paulette Koronkevich Undergraduate Student — Computer Science Indiana University

Paulette is a senior undergraduate at Indiana University, majoring in Computer Science with a focus on programming languages. She's currently applying to graduate programs to pursue her Ph.D. in programming languages, primarily interested in compilers and type systems. Paulette attended the OurCS conference last year at Carnegie Mellon. She's had some research experience — working with a professor at Indiana University as well as an REU at Carnegie Mellon University this past summer. She'll be able to provide some insight into pursuing other research opportunities after the conference, as well as commenting on any of her other activities — being an undergraduate teaching assistant, taking too many interesting classes, and jamming to cool tunes.

Atreyee Mukherjee Ph.D. Candidate — Computer Science Indiana University

Atreyee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Computer Science program at Indiana University. She primarily works on the problems related to Natural Language Processing. She has worked on projects related to detecting mental health issues from written text. Currently, she is working on identifying social factors (also known as social determinants of health) that affect the health and general well being of a person, using free text medical notes. Her dissertation focuses on improving domain adaptation and generating domain-expert models for parsing textual data.

Maggie Oates Ph.D. Student — Computer Science Graduate Research Assistant — Institute for Software Research Carnegie Mellon University

Maggie is a 2nd-year Societal Computing Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Cylab Usable Privacy and Security lab. She's had a wandering path through computing research topics, including Unicode design, agricultural robots, children's privacy drawings, secure authentication, codes of ethics, and sewing. She sits on the Board of Trustees for AnitaB.org and plans to someday work in technology policy.

Pam Thomas Ph.D. Student — Computer Science University of Notre Dame

Pam received her master's degree in computer science at Indiana University in May 2013. While there, she spent her time implementing new homomorphic encryption schemes and taking classes in algorithms, parallel computing, and database security, while improving her communication skills by passing on her knowledge to undergraduate students by teaching an introductory class in Scheme. In summer 2012, she gained practical experience in the computer science field by working in an internship where she managed code that had been compiled by an automatic MATLAB to C script parser. After graduation, she started to work for Eli Lilly and Company in the data mining space, leveraging technologies and creating services for people to solve business problems through data mining. Some of the larger projects that she has worked on include a large data migration project from legacy systems to SAP and an agile app development. Today she is working towards a Ph.D. in computer science at Notre Dame, with the aim of using machine learning to improve media literacy and stem the spread of misinformation.

Tian Linger Xu Postdoctoral Fellow — Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Indiana University

Tian (Linger) Xu is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. Her research focuses on interpersonal coordination in social interaction. To understand how humans develop the social skills needed to engage in smooth coordination with each other, she conducts infant-parent interaction experiments with state-of-the-art multimodal wearable sensors, such as head-mounted eye-tracker and wireless motion tracking system. She also develops novel time-series analysis methods to examine and model the mechanism that underlies real-time social coordination. Additionally, she uses social robotic agents to investigate the effects of different real-time responsive behaviors and learning models in human-robot interaction studies. She received her dual Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Indiana University in 2018.


Writing a Statement of Purpose
Lamara Warren Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Indiana University

Lamara Warren is an Assistant Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University and provides proficient guidance and leadership to the School on topics of diversity and inclusive excellence. Her research interests include higher education access and equity issues, diversity and social justice issues in higher education, Black women leadership development, cultural living learning communities, student-athletes, academic persistence, institutional research and institutional effectiveness. Ultimately, she is committed to increasing the number of underrepresented students obtaining advanced degrees, specifically in STEAM disciplines.


SUNDAY


Finding a Research Opportunity
Sarah Loos Software Engineer Google AI

Sarah Loos is a software engineer at Google AI who has worked on logical analysis and formal verification of distributed hybrid systems, and deep learning for theorem proving. She completed a Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, creating differential Refinement Logic for comparing and verifying hybrid systems. During her time at CMU, Sarah was a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Sarah serves on the board of directors for Learning Equality. She has previously served on the board of trustees and board of advisors for AnitaB.org. Sarah was named Woman of the Year in 2009 by the Women In Computing group at Indiana University.

Katie Siek Associate Professor — Informatics School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Indiana University

Katie Siek is an associate professor in Informatics at Indiana University and the Director of Informatics Undergraduate Studies. Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics, and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, she is interested in how sociotechnical interventions affect personal health and well being. Her research is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation including a five-year NSF CAREER award. She received the 2018 Outstanding Faculty Mentor-Advocate award from CEWiT, a prize given to faculty who display noteworthy mentorship and are nominated by their mentees or peers. She received the Borg Early Career Award, an annual award given by CRA-W to a woman in the early stages in her career who has made significant research contributions and an Engineering New Professor Award at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she used to work. She was named Woman of the Year in 2006 by the Women In Computing group at Indiana University.