Virtual Undergraduate Town Hall Series
PLEASE NOTE: This program has been retired.
Do you want to learn about exciting new research ideas being pursued by researchers and role models in your field?
Do you want to have the opportunity to ask leading researchers questions and receive mentoring about research career possibilities?
Watch recordings from past events.
This program is evaluated by the Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline (CERP).
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (1504243). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This an ACM-W publicity collaboration project.
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Find a schedule of upcoming events here.
| Anna Karlin, Microsoft Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington |
Anna R. Karlin received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987. Before coming to the University of Washington, she spent 5 years as a researcher at (what was then) Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center. Her research is primarily in theoretical computer science: the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly algorithmic game theory, probabilistic and online algorithms. She also works at the interface between theory and other areas, such as economics and game theory, data mining, operating systems, networks, and distributed systems. In addition to her many papers, she is coauthor of the book “Game Theory, Alive” with Yuval Peres, published in 2017 by the American Mathematical Society. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. |
Virtual Undergraduate Town Hall – Optimizing in a Strategic World: An Invitation to Algorithmic Game Theory | 11/15/18 |
| Alexandra Meliou, Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
Alexandra Meliou is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Science, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to that, she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Washington. Alexandra received her PhD degree from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She has received recognitions for research and teaching, including a CACM Research Highlight, an ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a Lilly Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. Her research focuses on data provenance, causality, explanations, data quality, and algorithmic fairness. |
Big Messy Data: Looking for the Signal in Noisy and Biased Data | 10/4/18 |
| Sanjana Sahayaraj, Ph.D. student at University of California, Santa Barbara |
Sanjana is a second year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Linda Petzold. Before joining her Ph.D. program, Sanjana completed her Bachelor’s at SSN College of Engineering under Anna University in Chennai, India. Sanjana’s been interested in medicine and it’s applications since middle school, and developed a love for computers and was appraised of being good with them around 8th grade. In high school, she was a biology and math double major to get the best of both worlds. But when it came to choosing a college (engineering school and medical school are never in the same campus in India), she chose an engineering college and enrolled in Computer Science. She struggled in the first two semesters, since she was competing against students who had majored in CS in high school and had great programming skills and not just math, but caught on soon and was able to start working on projects applying her CS knowledge to medical data. Her interest is ongoing and she does health data science research at UCSB supervised by Prof. Linda. Sanjana’s current research has been about Natural Language Processing techniques applied to clinical / medical data. Apart from research, she also does photography with heart and diligence. |
Exploring NLP Techniques to Help Build Medical Decision Support Systems | 7/26/18 |
| Aneeta Uppal, Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte |
Aneeta is a second year Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in Bioinformatics. She received her undergraduate degree in Biotechnology from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2015. She later moved to Charlotte and received her masters degree in bioinformatics at UNC Charlotte in 2016. She currently spends her time flipping between wet-lab science and computational biology. Her current research focuses on essential oils for human health. |
A Knowledge Base Analysis for Rosemary Officinalis Essential Oil (EO) | 6/28/18 |
| Kathryn McKinley, Senior Research Scientist at Google |
Kathryn is a Senior Research Scientist at Google and previously was a Researcher at Microsoft and an Endowed Professorship at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research spans programming languages, compilers, runtime systems, architecture, performance, and energy. She and her collaborators have produced several widely used tools: the DaCapo Java Benchmarks (30,000+ downloads), the TRIPS Compiler, Hoard memory manager, MMTk memory management toolkit, and the Immix garbage collector. She is currently a CRA and CRA-W Board member. |
Tail Latency for Interactive Services and Research Relationships | 4/5/18 |
| Verónica G. Vergara Larrea, HPC User Support Specialist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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Verónica is originally from Quito, Ecuador. She earned a B.A. in Mathematics/Physics at Reed College and an M.S. in Computational Science at Florida State University. Verónica has six years of experience in the high performance computing field and is currently working as an HPC User Support Specialist at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Verónica is part of the systems testing team and leads acceptance for Summit, ORNL’s next generation supercomputer. Her research interests include high performance computing, large-scale system testing, and performance evaluation and optimization of scientific applications. |
High Performance Computing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory: Careers, Research Opportunities, and State-of-the-Art Technology and Identify and Make the Most of an Undergraduate Research Experience | 2/8/18 |
| Taghrid Samak, Senior Data Analyst at Google
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Taghrid holds a doctorate degree in computer science from DePaul University, a BSc and MSc in computer science from Alexandria University in Egypt, and is currently pursuing her Juris Doctorate degree at the University of San Francisco. At Google, Taghrid applies statistical modeling for diverse network applications from capacity planning to wireless networks. Previously, she worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where her research focused on applying data analysis and machine learning to enable cross-discipline scientific discovery. |
Using Machine Learning for Network Capacity Management & Extracurricular Activities and Time Management | 11/9/17 |
| Preeti Bhargava, Senior Research Engineer at Lithium Technologies
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Preeti earned her PhD in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include pervasive and ubiquitous computing, context-aware computing and systems, mobile systems and applications, user modeling, personalization, recommender systems, and Internet of Things. She has published several papers at premier conferences such as WWW, IUI, Mobiquitous and UbiComp. |
Inferring User Context from Smartphone Data & Graduate School Application and Admission Process | 9/28/17 |
| Yunshu Du, Ph.D. Student at Washington State University, Computer Science | Yunshu is a third year PhD student studying Computer Science in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University. She has worked on research investigating Transfer and Multi-task for Deep Reinforcement Learning and Mining Student Data for Fitness. Yunshu attended the 2017 Grad Cohort. | Speeding up Deep Reinforcement Learning via Transfer and Multitask Learning & How to Choose a Research Direction as an Undergraduate | 7/27/17 |
| Nancy Amato, Unocal Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M | Nancy is Unocal Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M where she co-directs the Parasol Lab. She received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her main areas of research focus are motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed computing. | Planning Motions for Robots, Crowds and Proteins & Why Recommendation Letters are Important and How to Cultivate Them | 6/13/17 |
| Rebecca Wright, Director, DIMACS, Professor, Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University | Rebecca is a professor in the Computer Science Department and Director of DIMACS at Rutgers. Earlier, she was a professor in the Computer Science Department at Stevens Institute of Technology and a researcher in the Secure Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs. Her research spans the area of information security, including cryptography, privacy, foundations of computer security, and fault-tolerant distributed computing, as well as foundations of networking. | Privacy in Today’s World & Getting Involved in CS Extra-curricular Activities | 4/18/17 |
| Katherine Sittig-Boyd, Data Analyst for the Boston Data Group | Katherine is a Data Analyst for the Boston Data Group. She is a three-time Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates (CREU) program participant and one-time Distributed Research Experience for Undergraduates (DREU) program participant. | Getting Involved in Undergraduate Research | 12/1/16 |
| Deb Agarwal, Senior Scientist, Data Science and Technology, Department Head, Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
Deb is the Data Science and Technology Department Head, Inria International Chair, and a Berkeley Institute for Data Science Senior Fellow. Her research focuses on scientific tools which enable sharing of scientific experiments, advanced networking infrastructure to support sharing of scientific data, data analysis support infrastructure for eco-science, and cybersecurity infrastructure to secure collaborative environments. Some of the projects Deb is working on include: AmeriFlux data processing and management, advanced computational subsurface modeling data management, and infrastructure for carbon capture simulations. |
Enabling Science Breakthroughs Using Computer Science & Becoming a Leader | 10/13/16 |
| Tanya Amert, Ph.D. Student at UNC, Chapel Hill, Computer Science |
Tanya is currently a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the department of Computer Science. She received her Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees from MIT, and then spent three years at Microsoft, working as a Software Engineer in Office 365. Her research focuses on physically-based simulations for VR applications such as virtual try-on. |
Accelerated Cloth Simulation for Virtual Try-On & Grad School Applications 101 | 7/14/16 |
| Lori Clarke, Emerita Professor, College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst |
Lori is an emerita professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst, after serving on the computer science faculty for forty years and as chair from 2011-2015. Her research is in the area of software engineering. She is one of the initial developers of symbolic execution and developed one of the first model checking systems applicable to software systems. Recently she has been investigating applying software engineering technologies to detect errors and vulnerabilities in complex, human-intensive processes in domains such as healthcare and digital government. |
Using Software Engineering to Help Reduce Medical Errors & Mentors: Why do we need them and how do we find them? | 4/7/16 |
| Mondira Pant, Lead Technologist on-chip at Intel Corp. | Mondira received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. She is now an Academic Research Director at Intel Corporation. | How to Prevent an Unruly Power Delivery System & Building Self-Confidence | 2/24/16 |
| Ayanna Howard, Motorola Foundation Professor at Georgia Tech | Ayanna is the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in Bioengineering in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her B.S. in Engineering from Brown University, her M.S.E.E. from the University of Southern California, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California. Her area of research is centered around the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive capability into the control path of autonomous systems. | Designing Healthcare Robots for Children with Special Needs & Finding and Making the Most of an Undergraduate Research Experience | 11/30/15 |
| A.J. Bernheim Brush, Senior Researcher at Microsoft | A.J.’s research area is Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on Ubiquitous Computing and Computer Supported Collaboration (CSCW). Currently embedded in a Microsoft product group, she spent the previous 11 years in Microsoft Research. A.J. is most well known for her research on technologies for families and her expertise conducting field studies of technology. | Inventing Technology for Homes and Families & Graduate School in CS: Why go and how do I get there? | 10/8/15 |
